Appel: NLE Special Issue

Tue Jun 1 12:59:15 UTC 1999

From: Jan van Kuppevelt <kuppevel at adler.ims.uni-stuttgart.de>

                             CALL FOR PAPERS

                      Natural Language Engineering

                             Special Issue on

     Best Practice in Spoken Language Dialogue Systems Engineering

NLE SPECIAL ISSUE AS A DISC INITIATIVE

A special issue on Best Practice in Spoken Language Dialogue Systems
Engineering will be published by the journal of Natural Language
Engineering (NLE; Cambridge University Press) in the beginning of
2000. This issue is an initiative of the European Esprit project DISC
(June 1997-December 1999), formally called "DISC Spoken Language
Dialogue Systems and Components. Best practice in development and
evaluation". The main goal of DISC is to identify current practice in
the development and evaluation of Spoken Language Dialogue Systems
(SLDSs) and their components, in order to come to a definition of best
practice. DISC intends to contribute to the establishment of dialogue
engineering guidelines to be used by different target groups, among
others developers, deployers and customers.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES

The interest in SLDSs has increased enormously over the last few
years: at present there is a large number of systems available many of
them for commercial use; the number is growing rapidly and so is the
variety of functionalities and domains of application. These
developments have led to a situation in which there is a great need,
shared by developers, deployers and customers alike, for effective
guidelines, which will enable them to make well-formed design and
implementation decisions, in accordance with broad consensus of what
must be 'best practice' in this particular engineering domain.

The purpose of this special issue is to bring together leading views on
what might be considered to be best practice in the development and
evaluation of SLDSs. We are aware that this is a delicate notion - what
constitutes best practice depends on the kinds and complexity of tasks
the SLDSs are to perform (e.g., with increasing task complexity, the
need for improved dialogue control requires more sophisticated control
of input speech and input language processing) and on a number of
other constraints on SLDS development, having to do with resources
available for system development, the constraints imposed by the
different groups involved (e.g., developers' constraints, customer
preferences and user group defined constraints), etc. So, we would
like to take as a starting point a definition of best practice relative
to factual constraints imposed on SLDS development.

THEME

In agreement with the main goal of DISC, the general theme for the
special issue is what could be taken as best practice in SLDS
engineering, given the availability of different technological options
with their inherent merits and limitations which are subject to
different constraints on system (component) realization.

We are interested in new, high quality papers which address, along the
lines of the objectives above, one or more of the following issues:

(i)  best practice in the development and evaluation of SLDSs as a
     whole or

(ii) best practice in the development and evaluation of one or more of
     the following system aspects, as well as of the interaction between
     them:

     -  speech recognition
     -  speech synthesis
     -  natural language understanding and generation
     -  dialogue management
     -  human factors
     -  system integration

All papers should fall within the scope of NLE, as described in the
instructions for contributors to the journal. This mainly implies that
the research views, comparative discussions, etc. described in the
papers must have a clear potential for practical application, in this
particular case meaning that they contribute to guidelines for SLDSs
best practice  (see also the NLE web page, the reference of which is
given below).

SUBMISSIONS

Submissions to the special issue should be in line with the NLE style
sheet, which is obtainable via the NLE web page. The length of a paper
should be 10-12 journal pages. Electronic submissions should be sent
as a postscript file by e-mail to the co-ordinating special issue
editor. Alternatively, 6 hardcopies can be sent to the editorial
address given below. The deadline for submission is September 1, 1999.

Authors are asked to e-mail a short statement of their intention to
submit a paper to the co-ordinating special issue editor before
July 15, 1999.

REVIEW PROCEDURE

All papers, both those submitted by members of DISC and from outside
the project, will be double reviewed and triple reviewed if necessary.

The review committee consists of seven members of the DISC consortium,
one member of the DISC Advisory Panel, three members of the NLE
editorial board and a group of ten external referees. In case of a
very large number of submissions the review committee will be extended
accordingly.

-  DISC referees:

   Niels Ole Bernsen (Odense University, Denmark)
   Laila Dybkjaer (Odense University, Denmark)
   Lori Lamel (CNRS-LIMSI, France)
   Patrick Paroubeck (CNRS-LIMSI, France)
   Inger Karlsson (KTH Stockholm, Sweden)
   Simon Thornton (Vocalis Ltd, Cambridge, UK)
   Paul Heisterkamp (DaimlerChrysler Research Center Ulm, Germany)

-  DISC Advisory Panel:

   Susann Luperfoy (IET, USA)

-  NLE referees:

   Peter Bosch (IBM Scientific Centre Heidelberg, Germany)
   Phil Cohen (Oregon Graduate Institute of Science & Technology, USA)
   Yorick Wilks (University of Sheffield, UK)

-  External referees:

   James Allen (University of Rochester, USA)
   Robin Cooper (University of Goeteborg, Sweden)
   James Glass (MIT, USA)
   Julia Hirschberg (ATT Labs Research, USA)
   Eduard Hovy (University of Southern California, USA)
   Stephen Isard (University of Edinburgh, UK)
   Lauri Karttunen (Rank Xerox Research, France)
   Karen Sparck Jones (Cambridge University, UK)
   David Traum (University of Maryland, USA)
   Marilyn Walker (ATT Labs Research, USA)

IMPORTANT DATES

-  Intention to Submit Due Date: 15 July, 1999

-  Paper Due Date: September 1, 1999

-  Revision Due Date: December 15, 1999

-  Acceptance Date: January 2000

-  Publication Date: February/March 2000

SPECIAL ISSUE EDITORS

The special issue editors are the IMS group participating in the DISC
project:

Jan van Kuppevelt (co-ordinating editor)   kuppevelt at ims.uni-stuttgart.de
Ulrich Heid	                           heid at ims.uni-stuttgart.de
Hans Kamp	                           kamp at ims.uni-stuttgart.de

Editorial Address:

NLE Special Issue
c/o Jan van Kuppevelt
Institute for Computational Linguistics (IMS)
Azenbergstrasse 12
D-70174 Stuttgart
Germany

Tel.:  +49 711 1211357 or 6574548
Fax:   +49 711 1211366

FURTHER INFORMATION

Web site for Special Issue:
http://www.ims.uni-stuttgart.de/NLE_special_issue/    (under construction)

Web site for NLE: http://www.cup.org/journals/jnlscat/nle/nle.html

Web site for DISC: http://www.elsnet.org/disc/