Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 17, No. 803.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
www.princeton.edu/humanist/
Submit to: humanist@princeton.edu
Date: Mon, 19 Apr 2004 07:23:53 +0100
From: Shlomo Argamon <argamon@iit.edu>
Subject: CFP: AAAI Fall Symposium on Style and Meaning
AAAI 2004 Fall Symposium Series
STYLE AND MEANING IN LANGUAGE, ART, MUSIC, AND DESIGN
October 21-24 in Washington, D.C
In recent years a growing number of researchers working in artificial
intelligence, cognitive science, computer graphics, computer music,
and multimedia have begun to explicitly address issues of 'style' or
connotative semantics in their work. While it is still difficult to
precisely characterize these concepts satisfactorily (we know it when
we see it), common denominators of much of this work are: an emphasis
on manner rather than topic, a focus on affective aspects of
expression and understanding, and a search for 'dense' representations
of meaning in which elements simultaneously symbolize multiple layers
of meaning at once.
Recent areas of research in this vein have included forensic
authorship attribution, information retrieval based on document genre
or affect, composition of new music in a given composer's style,
rendering animation in different motion styles, analyzing
architectural styles for function and affect, and much more. Work in
all media shares the problem of formalizing a notion of style, and
developing a modeling language that supports the representation of
differing styles. However, due to the widely varying technical
requirements of work in different media, little communication has
traditionally existed between different 'style researchers'. The goal
of this symposium is to bring such individuals together, to seek out
common languages and frameworks for discussion, as well as to
establish a shared set of stylistic tasks, which can be used as a
testbed for extending and generalizing stylistic work.
THE CHALLENGE
While much work remains in developing shared formalisms for research
on style and connotation, we outlined a set of questions, which are
more-or-less common to work in all various media. These "challenge
questions" will serve as foci for the symposium, but should not limit
presentation/discussion of other relevant work:
· Is there a general theory for style, which cuts across all kinds of
human intellectual behavior? What is the relation between style and
other content (e.g. informational) in the work you will be reporting
at the symposium?
· Is there a general theoretical structure for the context that
informs style and connotation that can be applied usefully in
disparate media? Are there lessons in work you will be reporting at
the symposium that are generalizable across media and genre?
· In operational terms, what are useful models and effective
algorithms of the process of learning and producing style, and how can
such models inform our understanding of stylistic features in the
resulting work? In the work you will be reporting at the symposium -
can the models and algorithms be used for both understanding style and
generating style?
· Is style at the forefront of people's understanding the medium and
discourse in the community you have worked with? How is style
explicitly discussed or implicitly understood? How are stylistic
distinctions learnt and transmitted to others within the community of
recipients? In the work you are presenting, how is style understood by
the intended audience?
· How can we usefully model the social context of a work, as a
resource for understanding its style, its meaning, and its effect?
Does the work you report take the context and effect of style outside
the medium itself into account?
· What are the processes affecting stylistic diffusion among members
of a discourse community? What properties of the social context may
affect the transmission or evolution of distinctive styles? How is
the work you are presenting affected by understanding the social
networks in which style is embedded?
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
We encourage submissions from researchers working in all
media. Particularly, in addition to academic researchers, we are
interested in presentations or demonstrations by practitioners and
artists using computational methods in their own
work.
Potential participants are invited to submit research papers, posters
abstracts, demonstration, performance, or exhibition proposals, and
panel discussion proposals on computational aspects of style modeling
and related areas, before May 3, 2004. Papers should not exceed 8
pages in length and should be submitted by email to
style2004@music.ucsd.edu.
ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
Shlomo Argamon, Illinois Institute of Technology, USA (co-chair)
Shlomo Dubnov, Univestiry of California San Diego, USA (co-chair)
Julie Jupp, The University of Sydney, Australia (co-chair)
Roger Dannenberg, Carnegie Mellon, USA
Graeme Hirst, University of Toronto, Canada
Jussi Karlgren, Swedish Institute of Computer Science, Sweden
Moshe Koppel, Bar-Ilan University, Israel
Rivka Oxman, Technion, Israel
Mine Ozkar, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
James Shanahan, Clairvoyance Corporation, USA
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