Call for Participation EMBODIED LANGUAGE AND ACTION AAAI 1995 Fall Symposium Series November 10-12, 1995 MIT, Cambridge Massachusetts This symposium focuses on agents that can use language or similar communication, such as gesture, to facilitate extended interactions in a shared physical or simulated world. We examine how this embodiment in a shared world both stimulates communication and provides a resource for understanding it. Our focus is on the design of artificial agents, implemented in software, hardware, or as animated characters. Papers should clearly relate the technical content presented to one of the following tasks: --- Two or more communicating agents work together to construct, carry out maintenance on, or destroy a physical or simulated artifact (Collaborative Engagement) --- An agent assists a human by fetching or delivering physical or software objects. The human communicates with the agent about what is to be fetched or delivered to where. (Delivery Assistance) We solicit papers on the following issues (not to the exclusion of others): -- Can task contexts act as resources for communication by simplifying the interpretation and production of communicative acts? -- How does physical embodiment and its concomitant resource limitation affect an agent's ability to interpret or generate language? -- Can architectures designed to support perception and action support language or other forms of communication? -- How can agents to mediate between the propositional representations of language and the (often) non-propositional representations of perception and action? -- What tradeoffs exist between the use of communication to improve the agents' task performance and the additional overhead involved in understanding and generating messages? -- Do differences between communication used to support concurrent task execution and communication used to support planning, reflect deeper differences in agent ability? -- What is the role of negotiation, whether of task responsibilities, or of reference and meaning, in such situated task environments? Interested participants should submit either (1) a paper (in 12 pt font, not to exceed 3000 words), or (2) a brief position statement. Send contributions, plain ascii or postscript, by April 14, 1995 to ian@ai.mit.edu. Notification of acceptance will be given by May 19, 1995. Material to be included in the working notes of the symposium must be received by August 15, 1995. If electronic submission is impossible, mail 6 copies to: Ian Horswill MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory 545 Technology Square Cambridge, MA 02139 COMMITTEE: John Batali, UCSD Jim Firby, University of Chicago Ian Horswill, MIT (CoChair) Marilyn Walker, Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs (CoChair) Bonnie Webber, University of Pennsylvania