Corpora: 2nd SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue CFP

[Priscilla Rasmussen]

     (We apologize if you receive this message more than once)


                        1st Announcement

       2nd ACL SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue
                 Aalborg, Denmark, September 1-2
            (Just before Eurospeech 2001-Scandinavia)

     More up to date information on submission schedule,
     formats, registration and program committee may be
              found at the workshop website

Description

Following up on the successful 1st Workshop in Hong Kong in October 2000,
this will be the next in a series of workshops spanning the ACL SIGdial
interest area of discourse and dialogue. While there has been a lot of
activity in this area, and fairly frequent "specialty" workshops on
various sub-topics, until this series there has not been a regular place
for such research to be presented in a forum to receive attention from the
larger SIGdial community and researchers outside this community.

Invited Speakers: to be announced.

Topics of Interest

We welcome formal, corpus-based, implementational and analytical work on
discourse and dialogue, with a focus on the following three themes:

(i)   Dialogue Systems
      Spoken, multi-modal, and text/web based dialogue systems
      including topics such as:
      * dialogue management models
        (specific subproblems or general modeling, in particular
        models for mixed initiative and user-adaptive dialogue);
      * speech, text, and graphics integration (for
        understanding or generation);
      * context-based interpretation and/or response planning,in
        particular how this contributes to natural interaction;
      * strategies for handling or preventing miscommuncation
        (repair and correction types, clarification and
        underspecificity, grounding and feedback strategies);
      * utilizing prosodic information for various types of
        disambiguation;
      * task-driven versus conversational dialogue;
      * evaluation of dialogue systems including task complexity
        measurements.

(ii)  Corpora and Corpus Tools
      Corpus-based work on discourse and spoken, text-based
      and multi-modal dialogue including its support, in
      particular:
      * issues and problems in discourse and dialogue
        annotation;
      * techniques (including machine learning), tools, coding
        schemes and data resources for discourse and dialogue
        studies;
      * XML-based tools for dialogue access to internet
        information.

(iii) Pragmatic and/or Semantic Modeling
      The pragmatics and/or semantics of discourse and
      dialogue (i.e., beyond a single sentence) including
      the following issues:
      * the semantics/pragmatics of dialogue acts (including
        those which are less studied in the semantics/pragmatics
        framework);
      * incremental (plan-based,topic-based, etc.) models of
        discourse/dialogue structure integrating referential and
        relational structure;
      * modeling genre-specific aspects of discourse and
        dialogue structure, including the specific structural
        aspects of (interactive) digital media;
      * prosody in discourse and dialogue;
      * modeling politeness and non-recursive parts of discourse
        and dialogue;
      * models of presupposition and accommodation;
      * operational models of conversational implicature.

Submission of Papers and Abstracts

The program committee welcomes the submission of papers for full plenary
presentation. The papers must be no longer than 10 pages, including title
page, examples, references, etc. In addition to this, two additional pages
are allowed as an appendix which may include extended example discourses
or dialogues, algorithms, graphical representations, etc.

Besides papers for full plenary presentation, we encourage the submission
of short 4-page papers (inclusive title page, examples, references, etc.)
to be combined with a short presentation in the plenary session and a
poster presentation.

Full papers and short papers should be sent electronically to the e-mail
address sigdial2001 at ims.uni-stuttgart.de and must be received no later
than May 7.

The format to use for papers and abstracts is the same (ACL final paper
format). Stylefiles are available at the workshop webpage:
http://www.sigdial.org/sigdialworkshop01. Papers must be submitted in pdf
(preferred) or postscript format.

The title page should include the following information:

      Title:
      Authors' names, affiliations, and email addresses:
      Keywords (up to 5 keywords specifying subject area):
      Submission type (full paper or short paper submission):
      Abstract (short summary up to 5 lines):

Important Dates

Submission of full papers and short papers       May 7
Notification                                     June 20
Final submissions                                August 1
Workshop                                         September 1-2

Workshop Publications

Like full papers, short papers will be published in the workshop
proceedings. Authors of a selected number of full papers accepted for the
workshop proceedings will be asked to send in a version of their paper for
the publication in a book on current directions and developments in
discourse and dialogue, to be published by a renowned, international
publisher.

Panel Sessions

In addition to the regular paper and abstract submissions, the program
committee welcomes proposals for other relevant activities, such as
reports of working groups and initiatives, and targeted discussion
sessions. The program committee itself intends to organize two panel
sessions, the descriptions of which will be given in later announcements,
namely one specifically on spoken dialogue systems and the other on the
pragmatics/semantics of discourse and dialogue being directly relevant to
the first subject.

Program Committee

Co-Chairs: Jan van Kuppevelt (University of Stuttgart) and Ronnie Smith
(East Carolina University)

Organizing Committee

Laila Dybkjaer (local chair), David Traum, Julia Hirschberg, Ronnie Smith,
Jan van Kuppevelt.

Contact Information:

Questions about submission:   Ronnie Smith/Jan van Kuppevelt
                              <sigdial2001 at ims.uni-stuttgart.de>
Questions about local issues: Laila Dybkjaer  <laila at nis.sdu.dk>
Miscellaneous:                David Traum  <traum at cs.umd.edu>