2 September 2018, Compositional Approaches for Physics, NLP, and Social Sciences

Compositional Approaches for Physics, NLP, and Social Sciences (CAPNS 2018) will be colocated with QI 2018. The workshop is a continuation and extension of the Workshop on Semantic Spaces at the Intersection of NLP, Physics and Cognitive Science, held in June 2016.

The ability to compose parts to form a more complex whole, and to analyze a whole as a combination of elements, is desirable across disciplines. In this workshop we bring together researchers applying compositional approaches to NLP, Physics, Cognitive Science, and Game Theory. The categorical model of Coecke et al. [2010], inspired by quantum protocols, has provided a convincing account of compositionality in vector space models of NLP. Similar category-theoretic approaches have been applied in cognitive science, and now are being extended to game theory. The interplay between the three disciplines will foster theoretically motivated approaches to understanding how meanings of words interact in sentences and discourse, how concepts develop, and how complex games can be analyzed. Commonalities between the compositional mechanisms employed may be extracted, and applications and phenomena traditionally thought of as 'non-compositional' will be examined.