Twelfth International Symposium on Logical Formalizations of Commonsense Reasoning

We invite submissions for presentation at Commonsense-2015, to be held as part of the AAAI Spring 2015 Symposia series at Stanford University in Palo Alto California, March 23–25, 2015.

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. The challenges to creating such formalizations 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. Commonsense reasoning is relevant for many applications, including systems in which robots and humans interact, and natural language systems that use both commonsense knowledge and corpus-based learning. In his IJCAI 2013 Research Excellence Award lecture, Hector Levesque argued that commonsense reasoning is central for intelligent behavior and proposed the commonsense-knowledge-based Winograd Schema Challenge as an alternative to the Turing Test. We especially solicit papers describing research on the Nuance-sponsored Winograd Schema Challenge Competition, http://commonsensereasoning.org/winograd.html

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

• Formal representations, reasoning, and algorithms, for specific commonsense domains such as:
  • time, change, action, causality
  • commonsense physical and geometrical reasoning
  • biological, medical, legal, etc. reasoning
  • mental states and propositional attitudes, such as knowledge, belief, intention, desire
  • social relations
• Methods for creating commonsense knowledge bases, including:
  • statistical and corpus-based machine learning techniques
  • crowd sourcing
  • hand crafting microtheories
• 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
  • probabilistic, heuristic, or approximate reasoning
  • nonmonotonic reasoning
  • belief revision
• Meta-theorems about commonsense theories and techniques
• Relation of other fields, such as philosophy, linguistics, cognitive psychology, game theory, and economics to formal theories of commonsense knowledge

We aim for rigorous and concrete submissions, in a wide variety of forms, including new results, demos, surveys, empirical comparisons of different approaches, and papers on methodological issues. 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. Primary Contacts: Leora Morgenstern (Leidos), Theodore Patkos (Foundation for Research and Technology Hellas), Robert Sloan (University of Illinois at Chicago)

• Abstracts Due: October 27, 2014 November 3, 2014
• Submissions Due: October 30, 2014 November 6, 2014
• Submission Notification Date: November 16, 2014 December 2, 2014
• Camera Ready Copy Due: January 19, 2015
• Symposium: March 23-25, 2015

Submissions will be through Easychair.

• The text of papers submitted should be at most 6 pages long for full papers and 3 pages for short papers, prepared in AAAI format.
• The reference list does not count toward these limits and must be no more than 1 page long.
• Questions about submissions may be emailed to the program co-chairs.

• Speakers to be announced.