The first AREA workshop will take place in conjunction with the 11th edition of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2018) and is organized as a half-day session with plenary talks, posters and demonstrations. AREA is a SIGSEM-sponsored workshop.  AREA includes a keynote by Simon Dobnik (University of Gothenburg).

There has recently been increased interest in modeling actions, as described by natural language expressions and gestures, and as depicted by images and videos. Additionally, action modeling has emerged as an important topic in robotics and HCI. The goal of this workshop is to gather and discuss advances in research areas in which actions are paramount e.g., virtual embodied agents, robotics, human-computer communication, as well as modeling multimodal human-human interactions involving actions. Action modeling is an inherently multi-disciplinary area, involving contributions from computational linguistics, AI, semantics, robotics, psychology, and formal logic, with a focus on processing, executing, and interpreting actions in the world from the perspective defined by an agent’s physical preference.