Aim and Scope

Leveraging the foundation built in the prior workshops SpLU-RoboNLP 2023, SpLU-RoboNLP 2021, SpLU 2020, SpLU-RoboNLP 2019, SpLU 2018, and RoboNLP 2017, we propose the fourth combined workshop on Spatial Language Understanding and Grounded Communication for Robotics. Natural language communication with general-purpose embodied robots has long been a dream inspired by science fiction, and natural language interfaces have the potential to make robots more accessible to a wider range of users. Achieving this goal requires the continuous improvement of and development of new technologies for linking language to perception and action in the physical world. In particular, given the rise of large vision and language generative models, spatial language understanding and natural interactions have become more exciting topics to explore. This joint workshop aims to bring together the perspectives of researchers working on physical robot systems with human users, simulated embodied environments, multimodal interaction, and spatial language understanding to forge collaborations.

Topics of Interest

We are interested in but not limited to original research in developing computational models, benchmarks, evaluation metrics, analysis, surveys and position papers on the following topics:
  1. Deployment of Large Language Models for Situated Dialogue and Language Grounding
  2. Spatial Reasoning with Large Language Models
  3. Aligning and Translating Language to Situated Actions
  4. Evaluation Metrics for Language Grounding and Human-Robot Communication
  5. Human-Computer Interactions Through Natural or Structural Language
  6. Instruction Understanding and Spatial Reasoning based on Multimodal Information for Navigation, Articulation, and Manipulation
  7. Interactive Situated Dialogue for Physical Tasks
  8. Language-based Game Playing for Grounding
  9. Spatial Language and Skill Learning via Grounded Dialogue
  10. (Spatial) Language Generation for Embodied Tasks
  11. (Spatially-) Grounded Knowledge Representations
  12. Spatial Reasoning in Image and Video Diffusion Models
  13. Qualitative Spatial Representations and Neuro-symbolic Modeling
  14. Utilization and Limitations of Large (Multimodal-)Language Models in Spatial Understanding and Grounded Communication

Call for Papers

We cordially invite authors to contribute by submitting their long papers and short papers.

Long Papers

Technical papers: 8 pages excluding references.

Short Papers

Position statements describing previously unpublished work or demos: 4 pages excluding references.

Non-Archival Option

ACL workshops are traditionally archival. To allow dual submission of your work to SpLU-RoboNLP 2024 from *ACL Findings and other conferences/journals, we are also including a non-archival track. Space permitting, these submissions will still participate and present their work in the workshop, and will be hosted on the workshop website, but will not be included in the official proceedings. Please apply the ACL format and submit through OpenReview, but indicate that this is a cross-submission (non-archival) at the bottom of the submission form.

Submission Instructions

All submissions must be in compliance with the ACL formatting guidelines and code of ethics. Papers should be submitted electronically through the OpenReview protocol. The peer review will be double-blind.

Style and Formatting

ACL Template

Submissions Website

OpenReview

Important Dates

Invited Speakers

To be announced.
Inderjeet Mani
Formerly, Yahoo! Labs
Formerly, Georgetown University
 Malihe Alikhani
Northeastern University
 Daniel Fried
Carnegie Mellon University
 Yu Su
Ohio State University

Organizing Committee

Parisa Kordjamshidi
Michigan State University
kordjams@msu.edu		 Xin Eric Wang
University of California Santa Cruz
xwang366@ucsc.edu		 Yue Zhang
Michigan State University
zhan1624@msu.edu		 Ziqiao Ma
University of Michigan
marstin@umich.edu		 Mert Inan
Northeastern University
inan.m@northeastern.edu

Advisory Committee

Raymond J. Mooney
The University of Texas at Austin
 Joyce Y. Chai
University of Michigan
 Anthony G. Cohn
University of Leeds

Program Committee (Alphabetical Order)

  • Chris Paxton
    		•  Meta
  • Cristian-Paul Bara
    		•  Bosch
  • Felix Gervits
    		•  Army Research Lab
  • Drew A. Hudson
    		•  Google DeepMind
  • Jacob Krantz
    		•  Oregon State University
  • Jiachen Li
    		•  University of California Santa Barbara
  • Jiafei Duan
    		•  University of Washington
  • Jialu Li
    		•  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
  • Jiayi Pan
    		•  University of California Berkeley
  • Johan Bos
    		•  University of Groningen
  • Kirk Roberts
    		•  University of Texas, Health Science Center at Houston
  • Manling Li
    		•  Stanford University
  • Natalie Parde
    		•  University of Illinois Chicago
  • Raphael Schumann
    		•  Heidelberg University
  • Roma Patel
    		•  Google DeepMind
  • Simon Dobnik
    		•  University of Gothenburg
  • Stephanie M. Lukin
    		•  Army Research Lab
  • Weiyu Liu
    		•  Stanford University
  • Xiaofeng Gao
    		•  Amazon Alexa AI
  • Yanyuan Qiao
    		•  University of Adelaide
  • Yichi Zhang
    		•  University of Michigan
  • Yue Fan
    		•  University of California Santa Cruz

    Ethics Committee

  • Luke Edward Richards
    		•  University of Maryland Baltimore County
  • Yuwei Bao
    		•  University of Michigan
    If you are interested in joining the program committee and participating in reviewing submissions, please email at splu-robonlp2024@googlegroups.com including your prior reviewing experience and a link to your publication records in your email.