ACL'2000 - SigDIAL Workshop Call for Papers

[Priscilla Rasmussen]

			   CALL FOR PAPERS
		1ST SIGDIAL WORKSHOP ON DISCOURSE AND DIALOGUE
		Including  Theme Session on Principles for
			Dialogue System Evaluation

	*********** submission deadline extended to July 17 ***********

			October 7,8, 2000
			  Hong Kong
                       In conjunction with
                  ACL-2000: The 38th Annual Meeting of the
                 Association for Computational Linguistics

			www.pitt.edu/~dialcal/ACL2Ksymp.html

Description:

There has been a perceived need in the SigDIAL Community for a regular
workshop spanning the 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, there has not
been a regular place for such research to be presented in a forum to
receive attention from the larger SigDIAL community. This workshop is
intended to be the first in a regular series. A general session, open
to the range of work in the area is to be combined with a Specialty
"Theme Session", in this case on Principles for Dialogue System
Evaluation.


TOPICS OF INTEREST FOR THE GENERAL SESSION

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
      - task complexity and interfaces for less common and less
        expected tasks
      - repair, clarification and correction types
      - grounding and feedback strategies
      - user and user group modeling
      - mixed initiative and user-adaptive dialogue
      - re-usable components for different systems
      - generic architectures and common toolkits for building
        dialogue systems
      - speech, text and graphics integration


(ii)  Corpora and Corpus Tools
      Support for corpus-based work on discourse and dialogue, in
      particular
      - issues in discourse and dialogue annotation
      - tools and resources for discourse and dialogue studies
      - XML-based tools for dialogue access to internet information

(iii) Pragmatic and/or Semantic Modeling
      a. The pragmatics and/or semantics of discourse and dialogue
         (i.e., beyond a single sentence) including the following issues:
         - ellipsis and anaphora
         - dependent reference
         - presupposition and accommodation
         - genres of discourse and dialogue
         - politeness

      b. Specific aspects of discourse and dialogue structure, in
         particular
         - dialogue acts
         - rhetorical structure
         - prosody and discourse
         - temporal structure
         - topic-comment structure in discourse and dialogue
         - focus and the distribution of discourse referents
         - discourse structure and conversational implicatures


TOPICS OF INTEREST FOR THE THEME SESSION ON PRINCIPLES FOR EVALUATION
OF DIALOGUE SYSTEMS

As a special-theme session, we wish to discuss methods for evaluation
which promote fruitful research directions.  Contributions in this
respect are solicited on topics including but not limited to:

- evaluation of task-oriented dialogue systems vs.
    self-oriented (amusement-oriented) dialogue systems
- how to evaluate the efficiency and/or comfort of dialogues
- objective, quantitative, synthetic evaluation vs.
    subjective, qualitative, analytic evaluation
- relation of evaluation of dialogue systems with evaluation of
    other parts of NLP
- common tools and infrastructures for evaluation
- how to assess/implement diversity of dialogues in evaluation

The last topic may need further description: A generally important
issue in evaluation of allegedly intelligent artifacts is how to
manipulate the diversity under the present state of the art.  The
diversity of dialogues encompasses the vocabulary, syntactic
constructions, discourse structures, and so forth.  A major source of
the diversity here is the gap between linguistic expressions and the
description of the world to talk about. Diverse dialogues in fact
arise in tasks, such as the Map Task, involving pattern recognition.
However, the visual pattern recognition in the Map Task makes it
utterly impossible to computationally implement with the current
technologies.



SUBMISSIONS

To stimulate discussions, both the general and theme session will
feature both full paper presentations and short position/discussion
papers. Please indicate the submission format, as described below.

All papers should be sent electronically to dialcal at pitt.edu with
subject line SigDIAL workshop submission. Papers should be received by
July 17th to insure full consideration.

FULL PAPER SUBMISSIONS are limited to original, unpublished work in
the areas of interest. Extended abstracts of papers may not exceed
3200 words (exclusive of title page, example pages, and
references). In addition to the regular text, 2 additional pages are
allowed (as an appendix) which may include examples of extended
discourse, graphical representation of discourse structure, or other
supporting material.

The style files for submission are the same as the ones for ACL
regular papers, which can be downloaded from
http://www.cs.ust.hk/acl2000/Latex/index.html (for latex)
http://www.cs.ust.hk/acl2000/work/ACL2000_submission.doc (for MS Word)


 The title page should include the following information:

		     Title:
	             Authors' names, affiliations, and email addresses:
                     Keywords: Up to 5 keywords specifying subject
			area (preferably from lists above)
                     Which Session: General or Theme
                     Word Count, excluding title page and references:
                     Under Consideration for other Conferences (specify):
                     Abstract: short summary (up to 5 lines)



SHORT PAPER SUBMISSIONS

Short papers should be in the same format as long papers, but no more
than 2000 words (with similar final length). As well as original work
in progress, short papers may also involve positions on the topics
above, comparative analysis of other approaches, or new relevant
topics for discussion.


IMPORTANT DATES

Submissions		July 17th
Notification		August 10th
Final Submissions	September 1st
Workshop		October 7-8th


PROGRAM COMMITTEE:
Laila Dybkjaer (co-chair), Koiti Hasisa (co-chair), David Traum
(co-chair), Morena Danielli, Yasuharu Den, Barbara Di Eugenio,
Kristiina Jokinen, Pamela Jordan, Ian Lewin, Daniel Marcu, Katashi
Nagao, Akira Shimazu, Michael Strube, Jan van Kuppevelt, Marilyn
Walker (and others).

Contact Information:
Questions about submission:	        Pamela Jordan   <dialcal at pitt.edu>
Questions about General Session:        Laila Dybkjaer  <laila at nis.sdu.dk>
Questions about Theme Session:          Koiti Hasida    <hasida at etl.go.jp>
Miscellaneous and Logistical Questions: David Traum     <traum at cs.umd.edu>