Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the development of interactional artificial intelligence (AI) systems by democratizing their use. These models have shown remarkable advancements in various applications, such as conversational AI and machine translation, marking the undeniable advent of the human-machine era. However, despite their significant achievements, state-of-the-art systems still exhibit shortcomings in language understanding, raising questions about their true comprehension of human languages. The concept of language understanding has always been contentious, as meaning-making depends not only on form and immediate meaning but also on context. Therefore, understanding natural language involves more than just parsing form and meaning; it requires access to grounding for true comprehension. Equipping language models with linguistics-grounded capabilities remains a complex task, given the importance of discourse, pragmatics, and social context in language understanding. Assessing whether LLMs understand language is a doubly challenging task, as it necessitates not only grasping the intrinsic capabilities of LLMs but also examining their impact and requirements in real-world applications. While LLMs have shown effectiveness in various applications, the lack of supporting theories raises concerns about ethical implications, particularly in applications involving human interaction.

The "Language Understanding in the Human-Machine Era" (LUHME) workshop aims to reignite the debate on the role of understanding in natural language use and its applications. It seeks to explore the necessity of language understanding in computational tasks like machine translation and natural language generation, as well as the contributions of language professionals in enhancing computational language understanding.

Submission Guidelines

Ethics Statement

Research reported at ECAI and at the LUHME workshop should avoid harm, be honest and trustworthy, fair and non-discriminatory, and respect privacy and intellectual property.

Where relevant, authors can include in the main body of their paper, or on the reference page, a short ethics statement that addresses ethical issues regarding the research being reported and the broader ethical impact of the work.

Reviewers will be asked to flag possible violations of relevant ethical principles. Such flagged submissions will be reviewed by a senior member of the programme committee. Authors may be required to revise their paper to include a discussion of possible ethical concerns and their mitigation.

Submission Instructions

Papers must be written in English, be prepared for double-blind review using the ECAI LaTeX template, and not exceed 7 pages (not including references). The ECAI LaTeX Template can be found at https://ecai2024.eu/download/ecai-template.zip

Papers should be submitted via EasyChair: https://easychair.org/conferences?conf=luhme2025

Excessive use of typesetting tricks to make things fit is not permitted. Please do not modify the style files or layout parameters. You can resubmit any number of times until the submission deadline.

List of Topics

• Language understanding in LLMs
• Language grounding
• Psycholinguistic approaches to language understanding
• Discourse, pragmatics, and language understanding
• Intent detection
• Evaluation of language understanding
• Human vs. machine language understanding
• Machine translation/interpreting and language understanding
• Multimodality and language understanding
• Socio-cultural aspects in understanding language
• Effects and risks of language misunderstanding
• Manifestations of language (mis)understanding
• Natural language understanding and toxic content
• Ethical issues in language misunderstanding
• Distributional semantics and language understanding
• Linguistic theory and language understanding by machines
• Linguistic, world, and commonsense knowledge in language understanding
• Role of language professionals in the LLMs era
• Understanding language and explainable AI

Committees

Program Committee

• TBD

Organizing Committee

• Henrique Lopes Cardoso (University of Porto, Portugal)
• Rui Sousa-Silva (University of Porto, Portugal)
• Maarit Koponen (University of Eastern Finland, Finland)
• Antonio Pareja-Lora (Universidad de Alcalá, Spain)

Publication

As in the first edition of the workshop, LUHME 2025 proceedings will be published at ACL Anthology (Proceedings of the First LUHME Workshop).

Venue

The conference will be co-located with ECAI 2025, in Bologna, Italy.

Contact

All questions about submissions should be sent via https://luhme.up.pt/contact/