Tenth International Symposium on Logical Formalizations of Commonsense Reasoning

We invite submissions for presentation at Commonsense-2011, to be held as part of the AAAI Spring Symposium Series at Stanford University, March 21-23, 2011.

Endowing computers with common sense is one of the major long-term goals of Artificial Intelligence research. One approach to this problem is to formalize commonsense reasoning using representations based on formal logic or other formal theories such as algebraic representations. The challenges to creating such a formalization include the accumulation of large amounts of knowledge about our everyday world, the representation of this knowledge in suitable formal languages, the integration of different representations in a coherent way, and the development of reasoning methods that use these representations.

A decade ago, commonsense reasoning was considered visionary and long term, but it is now considered highly relevant for current applications, such as robotic systems that can interact with humans in open environments, and information extraction systems that use commonsense knowledge together with corpus-based learning to interpret natural language texts. Commonsense-2011 will have a new applied track in order to characterize what has been done in these and other areas, how the logic-based commonsense reasoning community has contributed in this respect so far, and how these trends should influence our research agendas in the future.

At the same time, we continue to encourage solutions to difficult challenge problems of commonsense reasoning, such as those listed on the Commonsense Problem Page.

Topics of interest at the symposium include, but are not limited to:

• Formal representations, reasoning, and algorithms, for specific commonsense domains including:
  • time, change, action, and causality
  • geometric space
  • commonsense physical reasoning
  • biology at the commonsensical level, such as zoology, botany, human anatomy, and so on.
  • mental states and propositional attitudes, such as knowledge, belief, intention, desire and so on
  • emotions
  • interactions among multiple agents
  • social relations
• Preformal analysis of original aspects of these domains
• Applications of commonsense reasoning to specific tasks including:
  • cognitive robotics (action and perception)
  • logic-based planning
  • natural language processing, machine reading, understanding narrative structure, textual entailment, query answering
  • web search and web-based services
  • Semantic Web
  • computer vision
  • computer-aided instruction
  • home automation
  • assistive technologies
  • biomedical informatics; integrating and mapping biomedical ontologies
• Relations among object-level theories, such as abstraction and contextualization
• Methods of deductive and plausible reasoning that are applicable to commonsense domains and problems, including:
  • answer set programming
  • heuristic and approximate reasoning
  • nonmonotonic reasoning
  • belief revision
  • probabilistic reasoning
• Meta-theorems about commonsense theories and techniques such as:
  • metalogical theorems such as completeness theorems
  • computational complexity
• Relation of formal theories of commonsense knowledge to alternative approaches to implementing commonsense, such as:
  • large commonsense knowledge bases
  • statistical and corpus-based machine learning techniques.
• Relation of other fields, such as philosophy, linguistics, cognitive psychology, game theory, and economics to formal theories of commonsense knowledge.

The symposium aims to bring together researchers who have studied the formalization of commonsense reasoning. We aim for rigorous and concrete paper submissions. While mathematical logic is expected to be the primary lingua franca of the symposium, we also welcome papers using a rigorous but not logic-based representation of commonsense domains.

Technical papers offering new results in the area are especially welcome; object-level theories as opposed to meta-level results are preferred. We also welcome demos of practical systems that make use of commonsense reasoning. In addition, survey papers, papers studying the relationship between different approaches, and papers on methodological issues such as theory evaluation, are also encouraged.

Papers may be submitted via EasyChair.

• The text of papers submitted should be at most 6 pages long, in AAAI format.
• The reference list does not count toward this limit.
• Questions about submissions may be emailed to the chairs.

• Peter Norvig, Director of Research at Google.
• One or two other speakers, TBA.

• Ernest Davis, New York University, USA
• Patrick Doherty, Linköping University, Sweden
• Esra Erdem, Sabanci University, Turkey

• October 28, 2010: Submissions due
• November 25, 2010: Acceptances
• January 21, 2011: Deadline for submitting final paper
• March 21-23, 2011: Symposium

(These have been revised since the original announcement.)