Corpora: NAACL-01 Adaptation in Dialogue Systems Workshop

[Priscilla Rasmussen]

_______________________________________________________________

* Note deadline extension! *

NAACL 2001 Workshop on
Adaptation in Dialogue Systems

Webpage: www.cs.utah.edu/~cindi/AdaptDial.html

Overview

The purpose of this workshop is to bring together researchers
investigating the application of learning and adaptation to dialogue
systems, both speech and text based.

Methods for learning and adaptation show promise for enhancing the
robustness, flexibility, and overall accuracy of dialogue systems. While
researchers in many parts of computational linguistics who use these
methods have begun to form communities, the burgeoning set of activities
within dialogue has remained relatively disparate. We are interested in
adaptation that includes learning procedures as well as decision making
methods aimed at dynamically reconfiguring dialogue behavior based on the
context. We would also like to explore techniques that allow a dialogue
system to learn with experience or from data sets gathered from empirical
studies. Researchers looking at methods to automatically improve different
modules of dialogue systems, or the system as a whole, have not had many
opportunities to come together to share their work. We thus welcome
submissions from researchers supplementing the traditional development of
dialogue systems with techniques from machine learning, statistical NLP,
and decision theory.

Call For Papers

We solicit papers from a number of research areas, including:

- Use of machine learning techniques at all levels of dialogue, from
     speech recognition to generation; from dialogue strategy to user
     modeling
- Adapting to the user as a dialogue progresses
- Dialogue as decision making under uncertainty
- User and user group modeling
- Use of corpora in developing components of dialogue systems,
     including issues in annotation
- Evaluation of adaptive dialogue systems
- Comparison of different techniques in applying adaptive techniques to
      dialogue

We also hope to include a session for the demonstration of working
systems, as time permits. The demonstration sessions will be open to
anyone who wishes to bring their adaptive conversational systems for
demonstration to other members of the workshop. Presenters are asked to
submit a paper that is specifically directed at a demonstration of their
current systems.


Important Dates (2001):

 Paper submission deadline:              Feb 19
 Notification of acceptance for papers:  Mar 16
 Camera ready papers due:                Mar 30
 Workshop date:                          Jun 4

Paper Submission

Electronic submission strongly preferred.  We will be setting up an email
alias in the next several days for paper submission.  Please check with
the web page for developments.

Submissions must use the NAACL latex style or Microsoft Word style. Paper
submissions should consist of a full paper (6 pages or less).  The
templates are available at the workshop web site.


Organizers

 Eric Horvitz         Microsoft Research         horvitz at microsoft.com
 Tim Paek             Microsoft Research         timpaek at microsoft.com
 Cindi Thompson       University of Utah         cindi at cs.utah.edu


Program Committee

 Jennifer Chu-Carroll         Bell Labs
 Peter Heeman                 Oregon Graduate Institute
 Diane Litman                 AT & T Labs
 Candace Sidner               MERL
 Marilyn Walker               AT & T Labs