CFP: EmeComm @ ICLR 2022

We are inviting submissions to the Workshop on Emergent Communication at ICLR 2022 on Friday April 29th!

This one-day, online, discussion-focused workshop will explore how communication is learned and how it can be leveraged to improve systems. This year’s theme, New Frontiers, will explore novel uses of communication and methods across disciplines (machine learning, philosophy, biology, linguistics, …). It includes exciting talks by invited speakers, discussion-groups by accepted authors and organized social events. The workshop aims to tackle grand challenges in language emergence and foster interdisciplinary collaborations. In addition, we will have 1:1 mentoring sessions for student authors of accepted papers and the award for best paper will be an artistic work by Simon Kirby.

The deadline is 25 February 2022 23:59 AoE and submission are on OpenReview

Please see https://sites.google.com/view/emecom2022 for more details and contact us [email protected] if you have any questions.

Thanks,
EmeCom @ ICLR 2022 Organizers

Call for Papers

We welcome submissions of research as well as review, and positional papers that may foster discussions across fields on learning to communicate and communication methods applied to other problems such as

• learning to interact with humans through language 
• modelling human language learning 
• multi-agent cooperation and communication
• investigating language priors of neural architectures 
• epistemic modelling of language evolution
• analyzing multitask learning and semantic drift
• population dynamics for optimization
• language as an information bottleneck
• And more

Submissions should be in ICLR 2022 format. Submission should be 4-pages long, without limit for references or appendices. Authors will be allowed to add an extra-page upon acceptance. The review process will be double-blind and hosted on Openreview. All ML submissions must be currently unpublished. We do encourage published work outside of ML, e.g. epistemology, cognitive science, psychology, neuroscience, that are within the scope of the workshop. We will accept the style format for conferences/journals from those fields and will have a lighter peer-review process. Note that those papers are not eligible for a best paper award.

Key Novelties

• No poster sessions, all accepted authors will lead small discussion groups on their contributions
• 1:1 mentoring session between senior researchers and student authors (and participants if there is availability)
• Best paper award is a work of art by Prof. Simon Kirby (one of the invited speakers)

Invited Speakers

Marco Baroni (ICREA / UPF)  Full Professor researching language-mediated intelligence, and bridging machine learning and cognitive science

Natasha Jaques (UC Berkeley \ Google) Postdoc / Research Scientist combining insights from social learning and multi-agent training to improve AI learning and coordination, as well as human-AI interaction. 

Simon Kirby (University of Edinburgh) Full Professor and artist investigating linguistic and cultural evolution. Pioneered computational techniques in language emergence and evolution. 

David J Peterson is a well known “conlanger” who constructs artificial languages for TV shows (Game of Thrones, The 100) and movies (Thor, Doctor Strange, Dune). He wrote and produced the video series and book ``The Art of Language Invention’’.

Jessie Sams (Stephen F. Austin State University) Professor of linguistics and conlanger focusing on connections between language use and other areas, such as genre, cognitive science, and identity.