CARLA: Concepts in Action: Representation, Learning, and Applications

CARLA is moving to Montreal!

After previous iterations of the workshop in Osnabrück, Bolzano, and Berlin, the fifth CARLA — Concepts in Action: Representation, Learning, and Applications — will be hosted by the Psycholinguistics and Cognition Lab at Concordia University, in Montreal, August 23-25, 2023.

CARLA is an international workshop that fosters interdisciplinary exchanges about research on concepts. We invite contributions from all fields within cognitive science, including linguistics, psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, and computer science.

The workshop is open for research on any aspect of concepts and semantics, with three overarching topics, addressing the following (non-exhaustive) list of questions: 

- Representation: What is the nature of semantic/conceptual representation? How are concepts processed in the brain? How do concepts compose to form complex thoughts? How can we formally describe and model concepts?

- Learning: What is the ontology of concepts and how do they develop? How do we learn to categorize objects and events? What kind of cognitive architecture supports concept acquisition and development?

- Applications: How are concepts used in cognitive tasks and in applied cognitive systems — such as applied machine learning in computer vision, decision making, category learning, etc.?

Keynote speakers:

- Alex Clake (Psychology, University of Cambridge)
- John Perry (Philosophy, Stanford University)
- Aishwarya Agrawal (Computer Science, Université de Montréal)
- Brendan Gillon (Linguistics, McGill University)
- Stevan Harnad (Psychology, Université du Québec à Montréal)
- Brendan Johns (Psychology, McGill University)
- Alan Bale (Linguistics, Concordia University)

In addition to the main session, CARLA 2023 will feature a special session, "Context: Linguistic Structure, Knowledge, and Beliefs” on the mapping between linguistic representations and propositions. This special session will be linked to a special issue of a journal (to be announced in the near future). The submission procedure for this session is the same as for the main conference (via EasyChair), but potential participants should select “special session”.

Deadline: July 1, 2023 (at 11:59pm, any time zone)

Submission via EasyChair:
https://easychair.org/cfp/carla2023

Further details on the workshop and abstract submission are available in the CARLA website:
https://conceptresearch.github.io/CARLA/carla_workshop/carla_2023

Email contact: [email protected]
Subject line: CARLA2023

Local organizers: Roberto G. de Almeida, Caitlyn Antal, Christopher Genovesi, and Tobias Ungerer

This workshop is sponsored by the following Concordia University Departments and Institutes: Department of Psychology, Centre for Cognitive Science and Linguistics, Applied AI Institute, Department of Philosophy, the Department of Classics, Modern Languages, and Linguistics, the School of Graduate Studies, and the Psycholinguistics and Cognition Lab (http://psycholinguistics.weebly.com).