A workshop co-located with LREC 2020
A workshop co-located with LREC 2020
May 16th 2020, Palais du Pharo, Marseilles, France
The workshop will provide a forum to present and discuss current research focusing on multimodal resources as well as computational and cognitive models aiming to describe people in terms of their bodies and faces, including their affective state as it is reflected physically. Such models might either generate textual descriptions of people, generate images corresponding to people’s descriptions, or in general exploit multimodal representations for different purposes and applications. Knowledge of the way human bodies and faces are perceived, understood and described by humans is key to the creation of such resources and models, therefore the workshop also invites contributions where the human body and face are studied from a cognitive, neurocognitive or multimodal communication perspective. Human body postures and faces are being studied by researchers from different research communities, including those working with vision and language modeling, natural language generation, cognitive science, cognitive psychology, multimodal communication and embodied conversational agents. The workshop aims to reach out to all these communities to explore the many different aspects of research on the human body and face, including the resources that such research needs, and to foster cross-disciplinary synergy.
The ability to adequately model and describe people in terms of their body and face is interesting for a variety of language technology applications, e.g., conversational agents and interactive multimodal narrative generation, as well as forensic applications in which people need to be identified or their images generated from textual or spoken descriptions. Such systems need resources and models where images associated with human bodies and faces are coupled with linguistic descriptions, therefore the research needed to develop them is placed at the interface between vision and language research. At the same time, this line of research raises important ethical questions, both from the perspective of data collection methodology and from the perspective of bias detection and avoidance in models trained to process and interpret human attributes.
By focussing on the modelling and processing of physical characteristics of people, and on the ethical implications of this research, the workshop will explore and further develop a particular area within visual and language research. Furthermore, it will foster novel cross-disciplinary knowledge by soliciting contributions from different fields of research. By attempting to bring results from the cognitive and neurocognitive fields to the attention of the NLP community, it is also in line with the “Language and the Brain” hot topic of LREC 2020.