Call for Papers

The detailed call for papers, including preferred formatting instructions, for IACAP 2013 can be found at the Conference Home.

We welcome papers on the way that these new approaches are transforming philosophy in the following areas:

  • Computational metaphysics
  • Computational epistemology
  • Digital archives and reference works
  • Cognition and visualization
  • Computing and art
  • Computing in the philosophy of information
  • Digital pedagogy and computer-enhanced instruction
  • Formal argument analysis and theories of reasons
  • Social computing and distributed philosophy
  • Computational metaphilosophy

This track will also feature two symposia; if you would like to present in the symposia, please submit your papers to the symposium organizers directly according to the instructions below.

Symposium 1: “Technology and the Classroom”

We are inviting proposals for presentations and/or demonstrations related to teaching and learning philosophy with technology at any educational level. We especially encourage work on the following topics:
• innovative and successful teaching strategies
• engaging students outside the classroom
• innovative uses of instructional technologies
• methods to improve student learning

Speakers include Mara Harrell (Carnegie-Mellon), Tony Beavers (Evansville), Selmer Bringsjord (Rensselaer Polytechnic), Eli Benzaquen (Rishon LeZion), Wilfried Sieg (Carnegie Mellon), Joyce Lazier (Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne), and Selmer Bringjord (Rensselaer Polytechnic).

PROPOSAL GUIDELINES
Send Submissions, via email, to Mara Harrell: mharrell@cmu.edu. Submissions should be received by Sunday, May 12, 2013.

Each presentation will be 30 minutes (approximately 20 minutes for presentation or demonstration, and 10 minutes for questions).

Please attach your proposal in Word (.doc or .docx), PDF (.pdf), Open Office (.odt) or Pages (.pages) format.

The Proposal should include:
• the presentation title
• a 100-200 word abstract for use in the printed conference program
• each presenter’s name, institutional affiliation (if any), and contact information
• a one-to-three page description of what the presentation will cover and what it seeks to achieve
• a list of equipment needed

Visit http://www.iacap.org/conferences/iacap2013 for additional information about IACAP or the conference.

Symposium 2: "Statistical Analysis of Philosophical Texts"

This symposium will introduce participants to several tools for the statistical analysis of texts, including the computational psycholinguistics package word2word and subcorpus topic modeling.

Session 1: Demystifying the "black art" of semantic modeling (Brent Kievit-Kylar, Indiana University)

Algorithmic learning models have allowed computational systems to automatically accumulate vast quantities of relational data that are proxies for the semantics of words. Philosophical corpora that would be too vast for single human consumption can be reduced and relations queried in seconds. This compressed and condensed information can lead to insights that would have been impossible for a human to discover from the full data set. However, with compression comes noise and possible inaccuracies. As with all models, parameters must be set and assumptions must be made. But how much do these choices affect the resulting output and therefore the conclusions of the modeler? Even worse, while most modelers know what they are optimizing against (human similarity judgments, previously established benchmarks etc) in the field of philosophical relations, we have nothing resembling a golden standard to compare our results to. In this paper, we explore how the “black art” of parameter setting in these semantic models effects the outcomes in a comparative study of differences in the outcome spaces generated. We focus on how single words or small neighborhoods can be affected by parameters such as dimensionality, windowing, stemming, and other cleaning procedures, using the BEAGLE semantic space model as a guide. We use visual paradigms for exploring these relations as well as novel, between words similarity plots. We conclude with a discussion of variables that least significantly control variation (e.g. dimensionality and window) and those that have the most control (e.g. stemming) as well as providing thresholds for parameters under which change is effectively irrelevant.

Session 2: Simulating expertise through subcorpus modeling (Jaimie Murdock, Lead Developer, InPhO Project)

As the number of digital philosophy resources expands, the distance between computational models and human expertise grows. However, when working on domain-specific problems, this is not always a good thing. For example, the most relevant documents about free will differ by subject area: a philosopher of mind will examine a different discourse than the metaphysician or ethicist. Through subcorpus topic modeling, we can simulate the discrimination of an expert and provide more focused search tools - moving from query-based search to topic-based search. In this demo, we will show how several different subcorpus topic models respond to documents in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. What does the logician see? What does the virtue ethicist see? The consequentialist? The P101 student? The theologian? We will also hint at how these tools can be used to guide discovery in a large-scale corpus, such as the HathiTrust Collection of over 10 million volumes.

We also welcome proposals for presentations on any aspect of statistical or linguistic analysis of philosophical texts.
PROPOSAL GUIDELINES
Send Submissions, via email, to Cameron Buckner (cjbuckner@uh.edu). Submissions should be received by Sunday, May 12, 2013.

Each submitted presentation will be 30 minutes (approximately 20 minutes for presentation or demonstration, and 10 minutes for questions).

Please attach your proposal in Word (.doc or .docx), PDF (.pdf), Open Office (.odt) or Pages (.pages) format.

The Proposal should include:
• the presentation title
• a 100-200 word abstract for use in the printed conference program
• each presenter’s name, institutional affiliation (if any), and contact information
• a one-to-three page description of what the presentation will cover and what it seeks to achieve
• a list of equipment needed

Please see the submission page for formatting details.