Corpora: ACL-2001 Workshop on Evaluation for Language & Dialogue Systems CFP

Fri Mar 2 15:57:00 UTC 2001

Call for Papers

Workshop on Evaluation for Language and Dialogue Systems
ACL/EACL 2001
Toulouse, France
July 6-7, 2001

WORKSHOP GOALS

The aim of this two day workshop is to identify and to synthesize current
needs for language-technology evaluation.

The first day of the workshop will focus on one of the most challenging
current issues in language engineering: the evaluation of dialogue systems
and models. The second day will extend the discussion to address the problem
of evaluation in language engineering more broadly and on more theoretical
grounds.

The space of possible dialogues is enormous, even for limited domains like
travel information servers. The generalization of evaluation methodologies
across different application domains and languages is an open problem.
Review of published evaluations of dialogue models and systems suggests that
usability techniques are the standard method. Dialogue-based system are
often evaluated in terms of standard, objective usability metrics, such as
task-completion time and number of user actions. In the past, researchers
have proposed and debated theory-based methods for modifying and testing the
underlying dialogue model, but the most widely used method of evaluation is
usability testing, although more precise and empirical methods for
evaluating the effectiveness of dialogue models have been proposed. For
task-based interaction, typical measures of effectiveness are
time-to-completion and task outcome, but the evaluation should focus on user
satisfaction rather than on arbitrary effectiveness measurements.Indeed, the
problems faced in current approaches to measurement of effectiveness
dialogue models and systems include:

Direct measures are unhelpful because efficient performance on the nominal
task may not represent the most effective interaction
Indirect measures usually rely on judgment and are vulnerable to weak
relationships between the inputs and outputs
Subjective measures are unreliable and domain-specific
For its first day, the workshop organizers solicit papers on these issues,
with particular emphasis on methods that go beyond usability testing to
address the underlying dialogue model. Representative questions to be
addressed include:

  o How do we deal with the combinatorial explosion
    of dialogue states?
  o How can satisfaction be measured with respect to
    underlying dialogue models?
  o Are there useful direct measures of dialogue properties
    that do not depend on task efficiency?
  o What is the role of agent-based simulation in
    evaluation of dialogue models?

Of course, the problems faced in evaluating dialogue and system models are
found in other domains of language engineering, even for non-interactive
processes such as part-of-speech tagging, parsing, semantic disambiguation,
information extration, speech transcription, and audio document indexing. So
the issue of evaluation can be viewed at a more generic level, raising
fundamental, theoretical questions such as:

  o What are the interest and benefits of evaluation
    for language engineering?
  o Do we really need these specific methodologies,
    since a form of evaluation sould always be present
    in any scientific investigation?
  o If evaluation is needed in language engineering, is
    it the case for all domains?
  o What form should it take? Technology evaluation
    (task-oriented in laboratory environment) or
    field/user Evaluation (complete systems in real-life
    conditions)?

We have seen before that the the evaluation of dialogue models is still
unsolved, but for domains where metrics already exists, are they
satisfactory and sufficient? How can we take into account or abstract from
the subjective factor introduced by human operators in the process?
Do similarity measures and standards offer appropriate answers to this
problem? Most of the efforts focus on evaluating process, but what about the
issue of language resources evaluation?

For its second day of work, the workshop organizers solicit papers on these
issues, with the intent to address the problem of evaluation both from a
broader perspective (including novel applications domains for evaluation,
new metrics for known tasks and resource evaluation) and a more theoretical
point of view (including formal theory of evaluation and infrastructural
needs of language engineering).

NOTE: People who would like to submit a paper on lexical semantic
disambiguation evaluation should consider the parallel workshop, on July
5-6, for the closure of the SENSEVAL-2 evaluation campaign.

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WORKSHOP ORGANIZATION

The organization of each of the two days of the workshop will reflect the
workshop's two main themes. Each day will begin with a session of
presentations of selected papers and follow with panel discussions to
synthesize and develop possible methodologies from additional selected
workshop papers.

WORKSHOP PARTICIPATION

The workshop seeks participation from people involved or interested in the
problem of evaluation in language processing and the research and industrial
communities that study and implement dialogue models for natural-language
interaction systems.

The first part of the workshop will specifically draw on the
natural-language interaction community, for instance like the one developing
at the confluence of SIGdial and SIGCHI, which will find in this workshop an
atmosphere more flavored by computational-linguistics related issues (see,
for example, the First SIGdialWorkshop on Discourse and Dialogue).

The second part of the workshop is intended to provide a forum for a broader
audience more in the spirit of the one that attended the LREC'2000 Satellite
Workshop on Evaluation (see http://www.limsi.fr/TLP/CLASS), in particular
offering an opportunity to people involved in language engineering
evaluation (e.g ., the CLASS audience) in the context of national or
transnational projects or programs, both in Europe and abroad.

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SUBMISSION DETAILS

Paper submissions should follow the two-column format of ACL proceedings and
should not exceed eight (8) pages, including references. We strongly
recommend the use of ACL LaTeX style files or Microsoft Word Style files
tailored for this year's conference. They are available from the ACL-2001
program committee Web site at http://acl2001.dfki.de/style/.

Papers should be submitted electronically, as either a LaTeX, Word or PDF
file to either:

Patrick Paroubek, pap at limsi.fr
Karen Ward, kward at cs.utep.edu

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TIMETABLE OF IMPORTANT DATES

Deadline for workshop paper submissions: April 6, 2001
Deadline for notification of workshop paper acceptance: April 27, 2001
Deadline for camera-ready workshop papers:  May 16, 2001
Workshop date:  July 6-7, 2001

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WORKSHOP ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

David G. Novick, UTEP
novick at cs.utep.edu
http://www.cs.utep.edu/novick

Joseph Mariani, Limsi - CNRS
mariani at limsi.fr
http://www.limsi.fr/Individu/mariani

Candy Kamm, AT&T Labs
cak at research.att.com
http://www.research.att.com/info/cak

Patrick Paroubek, Limsi - CNRS
pap at limsi.fr
http://www.limsi.fr/Individu/pap

Nils Dahlbäck, Linköping University
nilda at ida.liu.se
http://www.ida.liu.se/~nilda/

Frankie James, NASA Ames Research Center
fjames at riacs.edu
http://www-pcd.stanford.edu/frankie/

Karen Ward, UTEP, kward at cs.utep.edu
http://www.cs.utep.edu/kward

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SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE

David G. Novick
Joseph Mariani
Candy Kamm
Patrick Paroubek
Nils Dahlbäck
Frankie James
Karen Ward
Christian Jacquemin
Niels Ole Bernsen
Stephane Chaudiron
Khalid Choukri
Martin Rajman
Robert Gaizauskas
Donna Harman
Lynette Hirschman (tentative)
David Pallett (tentative)
Carol Peters (tentative)
Jose Pardo (tentative)
Herman Steeneken (tentative)
Oliviero Stock (tentative)
Saïd Tazi
Hans Uszkoreit (tentative)

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SPONSORS

 ACL 2001
 CLASS
 ELRA
 ELSNET

We also anticipate co-sponsorship from SIGdial.

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ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Additional information on the workshop, including accepted papers and the
workshop schedule, will be made available as needed at
http://www.limsi.fr/TLP/CLASS/eacl01.html