Proceedings of the 2016 Workshop on Semantic Spaces at the Intersection of NLP, Physics and Cognitive Science

TL;DR

This workshop proceedings explores the intersection of NLP, physics, and cognitive science, focusing on vector space models and their role in understanding language, cognition, and their physical and logical representations.

Contribution

It presents a multidisciplinary forum uniting NLP, physics, and cognitive science researchers to develop theoretically motivated models of language and meaning.

Findings

Vector space models unify NLP, physics, and cognitive science.

Diagrammatic reasoning simplifies complex semantic interactions.

Language models are influenced by physical and perceptual inputs.

Abstract

This volume contains the Proceedings of the 2016 Workshop on Semantic Spaces at the Intersection of NLP, Physics and Cognitive Science (SLPCS 2016), which was held on the 11th of June at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, and was co-located with Quantum Physics and Logic (QPL 2016). Exploiting the common ground provided by the concept of a vector space, the workshop brought together researchers working at the intersection of Natural Language Processing (NLP), cognitive science, and physics, offering them an appropriate forum for presenting their uniquely motivated work and ideas. The interplay between these three disciplines inspired theoretically motivated approaches to the understanding of how word meanings interact with each other in sentences and discourse, how diagrammatic reasoning depicts and simplifies this interaction, how language models are determined by input from the world, and how word and sentence meanings interact logically. This first edition of the workshop consisted of three invited talks from distinguished speakers (Hans Briegel, Peter G\"ardenfors, Dominic Widdows) and eight presentations of selected contributed papers. Each submission was refereed by at least three members of the Programme Committee, who delivered detailed and insightful comments and suggestions.