Interdisciplinary Laboratory on Interacting Knowledge Systems (ILIKS, 2004-2011)  
Annual and Concluding Meeting


28-30 November 2011
Auditorium Herbrand, IRIT, Université Paul Sabatier - Toulouse


Monday November 28th


14:30-15:00 Introduction, review of ILIKS activities and future perspectives

15:00-16:00 Tony Veale, (Invited Speaker, UCD Dublin & KAIST) "Seeing the Best and Worst of Everything with a Stereotype-based Affective Lexicon"

Abstract: Our affective perspective on a word is heavily influenced by the context in which it is used and by the features it is typically perceived to exhibit in that context. A nuanced model of lexical affect thus requires a feature-rich representation of each word’s potential to mean different things in different contexts. To this end, we present here a two-level model of lexical affect.
At the first level, words are represented as bundles of the typical properties and behaviors they are commonly shown to exhibit in everyday language. To construct these bundles, we present a semi-automatic approach to harvesting stereotypical properties and behaviors from the Web. At the second level, these properties and behaviors are related to each other in a graph structure that captures how likely one is to reinforce the meaning of another. We present an effective means of constructing such a graph from a combination of text n-grams and queries to the open Web. We calculate positive and negative potentials for each property in the graph, and show how these potentials can be used in turn to calculate an overall affective value for the higher-level terms for which they are considered stereotypical.
Finally, we show how this affective lexicon can be used to perform affective Web search with user-defined mood filters.

Coffee Break

16:30-17:15 Emiliano Lorini (IRIT) "On emotion intensity: a logical approach"

17:15-18:00 Nicholas Asher (IRIT) "Degrees of cooperativity in dialogue"



Tuesday November 29th


9:30-10:30 Raquel Fernández (Invited Speaker, UVA, Amsterdam) "Convergence in Conversation: The Case of Child-Adult Adaptation"

Abstract: People have a strong tendency to match the perceptual features of the signals used by their conversational partners. A wealth of empirical work has shown that adults rapidly converge on the same vocabulary, tend to use similar syntactic structures, adapt their pronunciation and speech rate to one another, and even mimic their interlocutor's gestures. In this talk I will focus on the asymmetric scenario of child-adult conversations and report preliminary results that show that there is a strong correlation between the complexity of the child's and the adult's utterances, indicating that adults adapt their speech at different levels of linguistic processing when interacting with children in dialogue. I will argue that research in this direction may shed light on the mechanisms underlying the observed convergence in both symmetric and asymmetric situations.

Coffee Break

11:00-11:45 Antoine Venant (LPL and ENS-Cachan) "Scope differences between RST and SDRT discourse relations" (with N. Asher and S. Afantenos)

11:45-12:15 Vladimir Popescu (IRIT) "Computing inter-annotator agreement on discourse units' attachments in SDRT" (with Farah Benamarah)

Lunch (buffet)

14:00-15:00 Noemi Spagnoletti and Elisabetta Visalberghi (Invited Speaker, ISTC) "Stone tool selectivity in wild capuchin monkeys"

Abstract: A few years ago, we discovered that wild capuchin monkeys living in Fazenda Boa Vista (FBV, Piauí, Brazil; a dry forest habitat) use hammers and anvils to crack open encased food, mostly palm nuts. Both nut cracking and tool transport require bipedal stance, reflect considerable motor skills, and have high energetic costs. Nut cracking activities modify the surface of the anvil sites and the same anvils are repeatedly used since after use tools are left there, or nearby. Field observations and controlled field experiments have demonstrated that capuchins at FBV select and transport stones suitable for use as tools on the basis of material, weight and distance from the anvil. Furthermore, capuchins selectively position the nut on the pits present on the anvil surface. Ongoing research is now exploring how social factors bias the way in which young individuals acquire nut cracking behaviour. Stone tool use by capuchin monkeys, a species that separated from the human lineage about 35 million years ago, opens up a new reference point for thinking about tool use across species and across evolutionary time.

15:00-15:45 Stefano Borgo (ISTC) "Intentionality in artefacts and functions"

Coffee Break

16:15-17:00 Emanuele Bottazzi (ISTC) "Social ontology and the unknown unknowns"

17:00-17:45 Claudio Masolo (ISTC) "On the mysterious disappearance of objects"



Wednesday November 30th


9:30-10:30 Giovanni Sartor (Invited Speaker, Bologna University) "Intentional compliance with normative systems"

Abstract: I will argue that the cognitive attitudes and operations involved in compliance with normative systems are usually different from those involved in complying with isolated social norms. While isolated norms must be stored in the memory of the agents endorsing them, this does not happen with regard to large normative systems. In the latter case, the agent adopts a general policy-based intention to comply with the normative system as a whole, an intention that provides an abstract motivation for specific acts of compliance, once the agent has established that these acts are obligatory according the system. I will show how the endorsement of such a policy can be based on different individual attitudes, ranging from self-interest to altruistic, social or moral motivations. Finally, I will analyse how a normative system may both constrain powers and extend them, relying on this abstract motivation of its addressees.

Coffee Break

11:00-11:45 Andreas Herzig (IRIT) "A dynamic logic of normative systems" (with E. Lorini, F. Moisan, N. Troquard)

11:45-12:15 Nicola Guarino (ISTC) "Open ontology-driven socio-technical systems"

Lunch (buffet)

14:00-15:00 Cédric Dégremont (Invited Speaker, Groninguen University) "Dynamics we can believe in: logic for interactive reasoning"

Abstract: Logic is breaking out of the confines of the single-agent static paradigm that has been implicit in all formal systems until recent times. We sketch some recent developments that take logic as an account of information-driven interaction. We discuss the general methodology behind these developments and focus in particular on a logic-based approach to interactive reasoning and 'agreeing to disagree' problems.

15:00-15:45 Jérôme Lang (LAMSADE and IRIT) "From Preference Logics to Preference Languages, and Back" (with M. Bienvenu and N. Wilson)

15:45-16:30 Nicolas Troquard (ISTC) "On collective agency and ability"