A workshop to be held as part of the Conference on Spatial Information Theory (COSIT), 10th September 2019, Regensburg, Germany
Call for Papers
Research into the description of location using human (natural) language as been approached from linguistics, geospatial, and computer science perspectives. This interdisciplinary combined workshop and tutorial will explore current developments in the area with a particular emphasis on the need for communicating about location across different contexts and for diverse purposes, and the particular challenges these differences cause for automatic generation, extraction and interpretation of natural language descriptions of geographic space.
The Scope
- approaches to automated extraction and understanding of natural language descriptions of location in textual sources;
- approaches to automated generation of natural language location descriptions;
- both verbal and written geospatial natural language;
- work on natural language related to both static and dynamic (movement) location;
- work that aims to understand/explore/investigate the use of natural language descriptions of location;
- future priorities in geospatial natural language research;
- geospatial natural language and ontologies;
- contextual factors in the use and interpretation of geospatial natural language;
- real world applications that motivate the use of geospatial natural language;
- geospatial natural language querying;
- recent/current technological developments and their links to geospatial natural language (e.g. social media, crowdsourcing);
- links between language and spatial cognition and behaviour;
- robotics and geospatial natural language;
- connections between geospatial natural language and other areas of research (e.g. qualitative spatial reasoning, semantics).
The Format
The event will include:
- A keynote talk from Dr Clare Davies of Winchester University, UK.
- 20-minute presentations of reviewed 5-8 page papers discussing current work in progress and future research directions and ideas.Submitted papers will be peer reviewed by members of the program committee.
- Five-minute position pitches, in which presenters give a summary of a research idea or viewpoint, culminating in the posing of a question of set of questions for discussion. These will be based on abstracts that will be checked for relevance.
- 2-hour tutorial on Cognitive Discourse Analysis (Tenbrink, 2015): How to deal with language in spatial information and cognition research
- A panel discussion on the workshop subtheme ‘communicating about space’, and particularly addressing the need to communicate locations across different contexts and for diverse purposes, and the challenges this places for generation and interpretation of geospatial natural language.
Cognitive Discourse Analysis Tutorial: How to deal with language in spatial information and cognition research
This short tutorial session offers practical support for the systematic analysis of language data collected in relation to studies within the scope outlined above. Typically, language data (such as location descriptions or verbal representations of spatial problems) are analysed intuitively with respect to content, addressing those aspects (e.g., particular thought processes or strategies) that the speakers are themselves aware of and that are easy to understand from what they say. However, it is often possible to gain further insights based on a closer, more systematic analysis of linguistic details.
Some aspects of language use reflect cognitive aspects that go beyond conscious reflection by individual speakers, and that are not necessarily directly observable in linguistic content – such as the perspective underlying an utterance such as ‘the chair on the right’.
The tutorial session will take the participants’ current or intended projects as a starting point to address the following issues, supplemented wherever suitable by practical exercises.
Scope: What kinds of studies would benefit from a closer analysis of linguistic and conceptual features represented in the language data?
Data collection:What kinds of issues need to be considered in the light of current research purposes?
Systematic linguistic analysis:Practical aspects of systematic data annotation, substantiated by linguistic insights.
Choosing an analysis focus: Language can reveal crucial insights about cognitive aspects such as perspective, granularity, inference, certainty, and more. We will discuss aspects of interest to the audience, and explore the ways in which they relate to the participants’ projects.
Research Papers
We invite submission of papers that describe current research/work in progress, between 5 and 8 pages in length including references. Submitted papers will be peer reviewed by members of the program committee, and accepted papers will be given a 15-20 minute presentation time slot during the workshop. Accepted papers will be published online in some form (e.g. CEUS-WS.org, workshop web site, University repository), and avenues for more formal publication will be discussed during the workshop.
Position Pitches
We invite submission of one-page position pitches, describing research ideas, proposals, opinions about the state of the research field or other material relevant to the workshop, and including one or more discussion questions. Accepted position pitches will be given a 5 minute presentation time slot, followed by time for discussion of the questions posed. Submitted position pitches will be reviewed for relevance by the workshop organisers.
Instructions for Authors
Papers should be between 5 and 8 pages in length (including tables, figures, and references). No specific formatting style is required, but authors are encouraged to use the standard COSIT format. Papers must be clearly presented in correct, grammatical English. References can be in any style or format as long as the style is consistent. Submissions will be accepted through Easychair (link pending).
Key Dates
Research Paper submission: 10 June 2019
Notification of Acceptance: 30 June 2019
Final version submission: 31st July 2019
Position Pitch Submission: Submissions can be made at any time up to 15th August 2019 and notification will be made within 2 weeks of submission.
Conference Organisers
- Dr Kristin Stock, Massey University
- Professor Chris Jones, Cardiff University
- Dr Thora Tenbrink, Bangor University
