Topics of Interest

We welcome formal, corpus-based, implementation or analytical work on discourse and dialog including but not restricted to the following themes and topics:

1. Discourse Processing and Dialog Systems

Discourse semantic and pragmatic issues in NLP applications such as text summarization, question answering, or information retrieval, including topics like:

• Discourse structure, temporal structure, information structure
• Discourse markers, cues and particles and their use
• (Co-)Reference and anaphora resolution, metonymy and bridging resolution
• Subjectivity, opinions and semantic orientation

Spoken, multi-modal, and text/web based dialog systems including topics such as:

• Dialog management models
• Coordination of speech, gesture, and eye gaze
• Text and graphics integration
• Strategies for preventing, detecting or handling miscommunication
• Utilizing prosodic information for understanding and for disambiguation
• Embodied conversational agents
• Generation for dialog
• Overlap in dialog

2. Corpora, Tools and Methodology

Corpus-based work on discourse and spoken, text-based and multi-modal dialog including its support, in particular:

• Annotation tools and coding schemes
• Data resources for discourse and dialog studies
• Corpus-based techniques and analysis (including machine learning)
• Evaluation of systems and components, including methodology, metrics and case studies

3. Pragmatic and/or Semantic Modeling

The pragmatics and/or semantics of discourse and dialog (i.e. beyond a single sentence) including the following issues:

• The semantics/pragmatics of dialog acts (including those which are less studied)
• Models of discourse/dialog structure
• Prosody in discourse and dialog
• Models of presupposition, accommodation, or conversational implicature
• Grounded semantics in situated dialog

4. Dimensions of Interaction

Methods to address how interaction is shaped by specific properties of users, goals, modalities

• Turn taking within or across modalities
• User modeling
• Models of adaptation, such as entrainment
• Comparison of interactions of distinct types (e.g., task-based versus tutorial)
• Multiparty interaction

5. Applications

The applications of dialog and discourse processing technology in areas such as:

• Training and education/tutoring systems
• Entertainment and gaming applications
• Personal assistants
• Online chatting, meeting, blog, and social network analysis
• Human robot interaction