Special session proposal for the 2023 IEEE Conference on fuzzy systems

Fuzzy Natural Language Processing and Applications

Topic and focus

Although language undoubtedly contains fuzziness in nature, the area of fuzzy-inspired natural language processing is still relatively emerging research.

The degree of fuzziness within human discourse needs to be captured, modelled, and used in context for a machine to understand the nature of the “conversation”.

There are significant challenges associated with the automatic interpretation and understanding of language by machines especially, as they lack contextual awareness.

The session will provide a forum to disseminate and discuss recent and significant research efforts in fuzzy paradigms and novel fuzzy applications within fuzzy natural language processing.

Rationale

This special session is relevant to IEEE-FUZZ, as novel solutions are needed across the computational intelligence landscape to solve many of the challenges associated with natural language processing, such as a deeper machine understanding of human subjectivity in language in given contexts.

The session will provide a forum to disseminate and discuss recent and significant research efforts in fuzzy methods for natural language processing in addition to hybrid and emerging computational intelligence paradigms.

It invites researchers from related fields and gathers the most recent studies including:

  • Fuzzy set models of human language
  • Fuzzy applications to human language processing
  • Fuzzy approaches to text mining and simulations of language use
  • Fuzzy ontologies for human language
  • Computing with words
  • Real world computational intelligence inspired natural language processing applications
  • Fuzzy methodologies, tools and techniques for mining and interpretation of social media textual data

Debates and discussions during past special sessions and beyond have led to research collaborations, which have generated IEEE papers, joint PhD supervisions and invited talks, which have started to bridge the gap between the computational intelligence and natural language processing communities.

Expected number of submissions: 10

Related special sessions

Previous special sessions include:

  • Fuzzy Natural Language Processing at IEEE-FUZZ-2021 in Luxemburg
  • IEEE-FUZZ-2019 in New Orleans
  • IEEE-FUZZ-2017 in Naples
  • IEEE-FUZZ-2015 in Istanbul
  • IEEE FUZZ-2013 in India
  • and the hybrid special sessions:
    • Computational Intelligence Approaches in Natural Language Processing at the 2014 IEEE WCCI Beijing
    • 2016 IEEE WCCI Vancouver
    • 2018 IEEE WCCI Rio
    • 2020 IEEE WCCI Glasgow
    • 2022 IEEE WCCI Italy

Organisers

Prof Keeley Crockett

Keeley Crockett is a professor in computational intelligence in the Department of Computing and Maths at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. She leads the machine intelligence and AI ethics themes within the Centre for Advanced Computer Science.

Research areas:

  • computational intelligence driven adaptive psychological profiling
  • fuzzy natural language processing
  • decision-based systems
  • the ethics of AI

She has obtained funding from H2020, ERDF, Innovate UK, The Turing Institute, EPSRC. 

Keeley is a member of the IEEE Task Force on Ethical and Social Implications of CI and has a number of IEEE Trans associate editor roles.

Prof Joao Paulo Carvalho

Joao Paulo Carvalho (INESC-ID/Instituto Superior Tecnico, Universidade de Lisboa) has a PhD (2002), a MSc (1996) and an Electrical and Computer Engineer (1992) degree from Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon (Técnico Lisboa), where he is currently a tenured associate professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computers.

He sits on the Board of Directors of INESC-ID, where he is a researcher and has coordinated five funded research projects and participated in more than a dozen national and European funded projects.

Main research interests include developing and applying new computational intelligence techniques to natural language processing, text mining, social network analysis, social sciences and earth sciences.

He is area editor of Fuzzy Sets and Systems and associate editor of two international journals.

He was:

  • General Chair of IPMU2020
  • Program Co-Chair and organiser of IFSA-EUSFLAT2009
  • Web Chair of the 2010 IEEE World Congress on Computational Computation,
  • Publicity Chair of FUZZ-IEEE2015, FUZZ-IEEE2017 and IEEE-WCCI2017
  • Program Chair IPMU2016

Prof Carvalho is a PC member of more than 30 international conferences.

Dr Naomi Adel

Naomi Adel is a lecturer in artificial intelligence and AI ethics at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her PhD (2022) from Manchester Metropolitan was Fuzzy Natural Language Similarity Measures Through Computing with Words. She is an early careers researcher and an active member of IEEE CIS and IEEE WIE UKI.

Her areas of research include fuzzy natural language processing, semantic similarity, fuzzy systems, machine learning, computational intelligence, conversational agents and the ethics of artificial intelligence.

She is an active member of the Machine Intelligence and Data and Artificial Intelligence Ethics research themes in the Centre for Advanced Computational Science at Manchester Metropolitan.