ANNOUNCEMENT (2nd CFP)

Fifth Workshop on Computational Models of Narrative (CMN'14)
Special Focus: The Neuroscience of Narrative

July 31 - August 2, 2014
Quebec City Conference Center, Quebec City, Canada
http://narrative.csail.mit.edu/cmn14/

Important Dates:

April 4, 2014. Submission deadline.
May 9, 2014. Notification of acceptance.
May 30, 2014. Final versions due.
July 23-26, 2014. CogSci 2014.
July 27-31, 2014. AAAI-14.
July 26-31, 2014. CNS 2014.
July 31 - August 2, 2014. Workshop in Quebec City.

Workshop Aims

Narratives are ubiquitous in human experience. We use them to
communicate, convince, explain, and entertain. As far as we know,
every society in the world has narratives, which suggests they are
rooted in our psychology and serve an important cognitive function. It
is becoming increasingly clear that to truly understand and explain
human intelligence, beliefs, and behaviors, we will have to understand
why and to what extent narrative is universal and explain (or explain
away) the function it serves. The aim of this workshop series is to
address key questions that advance our understanding of narrative at
multiple levels: from the psychological and cognitive impact of
narratives to our ability to model narrative responses
computationally.

Special Focus: Neuroscience

This inter-disciplinary workshop will be an appropriate venue for
papers addressing fundamental topics and questions regarding narrative.
The workshop will be held in association with the following meetings:

- The 36th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society
- The 28th Conference on Artificial Intelligence
- The 23rd Annual Computational Neuroscience Meeting

Papers should be relevant to issues fundamental to the computational
modeling and scientific understanding of narrative. The workshop will
have a special focus on the neuroscience of narrative, meaning we
especially welcome papers relevant to the neuroscientific and cognitive
aspects of narrative. Regardless of its topic, reported work should
provide some sort of insight of use to computational modeling of
narratives. Discussing technological applications or motivations is not
prohibited, but is not required. We accept both finished research and
more tentative exploratory work.

Illustrative Topics and Questions
- What are the neural correlates of narrative or narrative
processing?
- How can we study narrative from a neuroscientific or cognitive
point of view?
- Can narrative be subsumed by current models of higher-level
cognition, or does it require new approaches?
- How do narratives mediate our cognitive experiences, or affect our
cognitive abilities?
- How are narratives indexed and retrieved? Is there a universal
scheme for encoding episodic information?
- What comprises the set of possible narrative arcs? Is there such a
set? How many possible story lines are there?
- Is narrative structure universal, or are there systematic
differences in narratives from different cultures?
- What makes narrative different from a list of events or facts?
What is special that makes something a narrative?
- What are the details of the relationship between narrative and
common sense?
- What shared resources are required for the computational study of
narrative? What should a “Story Bank” contain?
- What shared resources are available, or how can already-extant
resources be adapted to the study of narrative?
- What are appropriate formal or computational representations for
narrative?
- How should we evaluate computational and formal models of
narrative?

Organizers:
- Mark A. Finlayson (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA)
- Jan Christoph Meister (University of Hamburg, Germany)
- Emile Bruneau (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA)

Program Committee

- Floris Bex (University of Groningen, The Netherlands)
- Fritz Breithaupt (Indiana University, USA)
- Rossana Damiano (Università di Torino, Italy)
- Kerstin Dautenhahn (University of Hertfordshire, United Kingdom)
- David K. Elson (Google, USA)
- Pablo Gervás (Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain)
- Richard Gerrig (SUNY Stony Brook, USA)
- Andrew Gordon (University of Southern California, ICT USA)
- Valerie G. Hardcastle (University of Cincinnati, USA)
- Chris Honey (University of Toronto, Canada)
- Ken Kishida (Virginia Tech, USA)
- Benedikt Löwe (U. Hamburg, Germany / U. Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
- Jeff Lowenstein (University of Illinois, USA)
- Inderjeet Mani (Yahoo, USA)
- Jan Christoph Meister (University of Hamburg, Germany)
- Livia Polanyi (Stanford University, USA)
- Marie-Laure Ryan (USA)
- Erik T. Mueller (IBM, USA)
- Moshe Shoshan (Bar-Ilan University, Israel)
- Timothy Tangherlini (University of California at Los Angeles, USA)
- Mariët Theune (University of Twente, The Netherlands)
- Emmett Tomai (Pan American University, USA)
- Atif Waraich (Manchester Metropolitan University, United Kingdom)
- Patrick Henry Winston (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA)
- R. Michael Young (North Carolina State Univeristy, USA)
- Jeff Zacks (Washington University of St. Louis, USA)