[Corpora-List] EACL-03 Workshop Call for Papers: Dialogue Systems

Wed Nov 13 13:25:27 UTC 2002

____________________________________________________________________________

                          EACL-03 Workshop  on

     Dialogue Systems: interaction, adaptation and styles of management

                            Budapest, Hungary, April 13-14 2003
          (Just preceding the 11th Conference of the European Chapter
                  of the Association for Computational Linguistics)

_____________________________________________________________________________

Introduction

The two-day workshop will focus on adaptation and learning in
intelligent interactive systems and especially on the new and
interdisciplinary techniques and applications that are needed to
realize such systems. The question of dialogue management style has
become an important issue in the field, and the workshop
aims at further discussion on how dialogue models in conversational
systems should be developed: can dialogue management benefit from a
learning strategy and, if so, will the systems be language
independent.

As we move towards systems that are more plausibly conversational in
nature we are faced with questions and issues that concern how to
manage a dialogue. The last 30 years has seen a range of approaches to
dialogue systems from the simplicity of Eliza (Weizenbaum 1966)
---originally a network but which we would probably now manage
with a few simple finite state rules--- on up to high
functionality multi-modal systems. As we look at the design of
dialogue systems over many years, we can ask if the underlying
components are now basically agreed and the rest is notational
variant or taste in logic? If we are in that state, it may
be only a sign of maturity, as in Information Extraction (IE) when
Hobbs argued successfully about 1992 that all IE systems were then
basically isomorphic.

On one hand, the notions of adaptation and learning have become
important issues when working with spoken interactive systems, and on
the other hand, machine learning research has matured so as to provide
tools and techniques for system designers and developers to build
adaptive and learning systems. The goal of the workshop is to provide
a forum for discussing how these aspects can be combined in spoken
dialogue systems, addressing especially such questions as what kind of
adaptation and learning is necessary, desirable, and possible for
speech interface systems, and how the new learning techniques can help
in achieving these goals. An important issue is also to clarify the
notion of user-centered design when building flexible and adaptive
systems: as it is not only the user who should adapt to the (limits
of the) system properties, the question that system builders and
designers must address is where and when the system needs to adapt to
the user. User modelling is thus an essential part of interaction
management in intelligent systems, and one of the workshop aims is to
investigate the limits and relation of the user models to interaction
models in general. Furthermore, there are various types of
architectures and frameworks that have been proposed to accommodate
adaptation and learning aspects into spoken language interfaces, and
the workshop aims to share experience, as well as successful and
unsuccessful solutions.

The workshop will address the unique requirements that the adaptive
and learning view-points pose for dialogue research, interface design
and system development. It offers a platform for discussion of
Dialogue Systems - a topic that is becoming increasingly prominent in
the field of Natural Language Processing, and in particular, it will
focus on two related issues:

1) The adaptation and learning in intelligent interactive systems and
the techniques and applications that are needed to realize such
systems.

2) The approaches to Dialogue Management.
In particular, whether Dialogue Management Systems (DMS) are
now generic and if not whether there are real differences in approach.

Topics of Interest

The workshop will bring together researchers and system developers who
share an interest in intelligent spoken dialogue systems. The target
audience consists of colleagues who work on theoretical and practical
issues concerning adaptation and learning in dialogue systems, and who
wish to discuss and exchange ideas from different viewpoints. We also
expect the workshop to be of interest to interface designers who want
to expand their expertise to specific system internal modelling
issues, as well as to those dialogue researchers who are interested in
exploring the possibilities of integrating research into larger
systems.

We solicit papers from a number of research areas, including but not
limited to:

- How can adaptive techniques be used in spoken dialogue systems?
- How effective is learning for Dialogue systems?
- What kind of limitations and challenges are there for applying machine

  learning research in practical dialogue systems?
- Is Dialogue Management language independent?
- What kind of representations and type of information are necessary for

  adaptation?
- What kind of requirements are there for the architecture and general
  development framework of adaptive systems?
- Can we always effectively distinguish the roles of dialogue management

  components and general architectures for dialogue and language
processing?
- Are all dialogue systems the same underneath the surface or are there
  fundamental differences to approaching Dialogue Management?
- Are there any specific requirements for adaptation in mobile
  environment?
- What is the role of user modelling and integration of user models in
  dialogue systems?
- What are future challenges for adaptive and learning systems?

Workshop Format

The 2-day workshop will include two thematic sessions that address the
two main topics of the workshop. Both sessions will combine long and
short presentations, demo sessions and extended discussions, and
feature a few plenary presentations on central topics.

The following thematic sessions are planned:
        Adaptation and learning in spoken dialogue systems
        Styles of dialogue management: are they really different?

Submission of Papers and Abstracts

The program committee welcomes the submission of papers describing
both theoretical contributions and project implementations. We
especially encourage papers that concern innovative frameworks and
offer new, even controversial view-points for developing interactive
systems that offer natural and rich interaction in an enjoyable and
satisfactory manner.

The papers must be no longer than 8 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.

The papers should be sent electronically to the e-mail address:
eacl-w6 at dcs.shef.ac.uk

The paper format is the same as used in EACL submission. Style files
are available at
http://ufal.ms.mff.cuni.cz/~hajic/eacl03/submission.html
Papers must be submitted in pdf format.

The title page (no separate title page is needed) should include the
following information:

           Title:
           Authors' names, affiliations, and email addresses;
           Preferred thematic session, if any.
           Abstract (short summary up to 5 lines);

Important Dates

 Submission                    January 7, 2003
 Notification                    January 28, 2003
 Camera-ready papers    February 13, 2003
 Workshop                    April 13-14 2003

Websites

Workshop website: http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~roberta/eacl-W06.html

EACL website: http://www.conferences.hu/EACL03/start.htm

Workshop Publications

All accepted papers will be published in the workshop proceedings.

Organising committee

Kristiina Jokinen (co-chair)
        University of Art and Design Helsinki
        Media Lab
        Hämeentie 135 C
        00560 Helsinki Finland
        email: kjokinen at uiah.fi

Yorick Wilks (co-chair)
        University of Sheffield
        Computer Science Dept.
        Regent Court
        Sheffield S1 4DP
        UK
        email: yorick at dcs.shef.ac.uk

Björn Gambäck
        SICS, Swedish Institute of Computer Science AB
        Box 1263
        SE - 164 29 Kista, Sweden
        email: gamback at sics.se

Bill Black
        UMIST
        Computation Department
        P.O. Box 88
        Sackville Street
        Manchester M60 1QD
        UK
        email: wjb at co.umist.ac.uk

Roberta Catizone
       University of Sheffield
       Computer Science Dept.
       Regent Court
       Sheffield S1 4DP
       UK
       email: R.Catizone at dcs.shef.ac.uk

Programme Committee

Jan Alexandersson, DFKI, Germany
Peter Boda, Nokia Research Center, Finland
Rolf Carlson, KTH, Sweden
Morena Danieli, Loquendo, Italy
Laila Dybkjaer, University of Southern Denmark, Denmark
Wolfgang Minker, Daimler-Chrysler Research, Germany
Arne Jonsson, University of Linkoping, Sweden
Scott McGlashan, Pipebeach, Sweden
Johanna Moore, University of Edinburgh, UK
Allan Ramsay, UMIST UK
Norbert Reithinger, DFKI, Germany
Andrea Setzer, University of Sheffield, UK
Alistair Sutcliffe, UMIST, UK
Markku Turunen University of Tampere, Finland
Tom Wachtel, Independent Consultant, Italy/UK
Ingrid Zukerman, Monash University, Australia