29 March - 1 April 2010, Linguistic and Cognitive Approaches to Dialog Agents (LaCATODA 2010), Leicester, U.K.

The age of information explosion gives us a whole new spectrum of possibilities for creating an intelligent machine. Many marvelous ideas of the dawn of Artificial Intelligence research faced problems of exceptions and the impossibility of manual input of all needed knowledge, but today we have vast amounts of data from sensors and text so that we can rethink classical AI methods and approaches. The increased use of WWW, RFID, Bluetooth, etc. could allow us to determine standard human behaviors, emotions or even moral reasoning according to the Wisdom of Crowds hypothesis. Collective input data could also help to retrieve knowledge about the physical world we live in. By combining Natural Language Processing methods with cognitive approaches, we can discover a new range of intelligent systems that understand us, our environment and our feelings.

In this context, we see a role for NLP and cognitive approaches to play in developing a new generation of user-friendly, safe systems that, through interaction with the user and the world, can learn how to reason, behave or speak naturally. We are interested in original papers on systems and ideas for systems that use common sense knowledge and reasoning, affective computing, cognitive methods, learning from broad sets of data and acquiring knowledge, or language and user preferences. The symposium intends to spark an interdisciplinary discussion on joining forces to return AI to its original, broader and deeper goals which are currently represented by AGI - Artificial General Intelligence.

For more information, see http://sig.media.eng.hokudai.ac.jp/AISB10/LaCATODA2010/