Introduction to the Second Workshop on Natural Language for Artificial Intelligence

Natural Language Processing plays a fundamental role in current AI research, as target of different scientific and industrial interests. At the same time, several AI achievements have shown their beneficial impact on applications in linguistic modelling, processing and generation. Especially the recent advancements in deep learning are drastically changing the landscape of NLP, where the continuous performance improvement on well established tasks is happening at an unprecedented speed. Therefore, Natural Language Processing is—still and once again—a rich research topic, whose cross-fertilization with AI spans a number of independent areas such as Cognitive Computing, Robotics as well as Human-Computer Interaction. For AI, Natural Languages are the research focus of paradigms and applications but, at the same time, they act as cornerstones of automation, autonomy and learnability for most intelligent tasks. Such tasks range from Computer Vision, to Planning and Social Behavior analysis, up to more imponderable cognitive phenomena such as creativity and human emotions. A reflection about such diverse and promising interactions is an important target for current AI studies, fully in the core mission of AI* IA. Still, we also believe this area is not only “populated” of scientific and technological challenges. In fact, we trust that at the crossroad between NLP and AI, new technological paradigms rise: the resulting methodologies and technologies can change our reality and their societal impact has not yet been fully-fledged. Given these premises, the goal of the workshop “Natural Language for Artificial Intelligence”(NL4AI) is to …