SIGDIAL 2009 CONFERENCE 10th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue Queen Mary University of London, UK September 11-12, 2009 (right after Interspeech 2009) Submission Deadline: May 4, 2009 CALL FOR PAPERS The SIGDIAL venue provides a regular forum for the presentation of cutting edge research in discourse and dialogue to both academic and industry researchers. Due to the success of the nine previous SIGDIAL workshops, SIGDIAL is now a conference. The conference is sponsored by the SIGDIAL organization, which serves as the Special Interest Group in discourse and dialogue for both ACL and ISCA. SIGDIAL 2009 will be co-located with Interspeech 2009 as a satellite event. In addition to presentations and system demonstrations, the program includes talks by two invited speakers: - Professor Janet Bavelas (University of Victoria): "What's unique about dialogue?" - Professor Yorick Wilks (University of Sheffield): "Artificial companions as dialogue agents". TOPICS OF INTEREST We welcome formal, corpus-based, implementation, experimental, or analytical work on discourse and dialogue including, but not restricted to, the following themes: 1. Discourse Processing and Dialogue Systems Discourse semantic and pragmatic issues in NLP applications such as text summarization, question answering, 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 dialogue systems including topics such as: - Dialogue management models; - Speech and gesture, text and graphics integration; - Strategies for preventing, detecting or handling miscommunication (repair and correction types, clarification and under-specificity, grounding and feedback strategies); - Utilizing prosodic information for understanding and for disambiguation. 2. Corpora, Tools and Methodology Corpus-based and experimental work on discourse and spoken, text-based and multi-modal dialogue including its support, in particular: - Annotation tools and coding schemes; - Data resources for discourse and dialogue 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 dialogue (i.e. beyond a single sentence) including the following issues: - The semantics/pragmatics of dialogue acts (including those which are less studied in the semantics/pragmatics framework); - Models of discourse/dialogue structure and their relation to referential and relational structure; - Prosody in discourse and dialogue; - Models of presupposition and accommodation; operational models of conversational implicature. SUBMISSIONS The program committee welcomes the submission of long papers for full plenary presentation as well as short papers and demonstrations. Short papers and demo descriptions will be featured in short plenary presentations, followed by posters and demonstrations. - Long papers must be no longer than 8 pages, including title, 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. - Short papers and demo descriptions should be 4 pages or less (including title, examples, references, etc.). Please use the official ACL style files: http://ufal.mff.cuni.cz/acl2007/styles/ Papers that have been or will be submitted to other meetings or publications must provide this information (see submission format). SIGDIAL 2009 cannot accept for publication or presentation work that will be (or has been) published elsewhere. Any questions regarding submissions can be sent to the General Co-Chairs. Authors are encouraged to make illustrative materials available, on the web or otherwise. Examples might include excerpts of recorded conversations, recordings of human-computer dialogues, interfaces to working systems, and so on. Copyright of the conference proceedings will be held by ACL. BEST PAPER AWARDS In order to recognize significant advancements in dialog and discourse science and technology, SIGDIAL will (for the first time) recognize a BEST PAPER AWARD and a BEST STUDENT PAPER AWARD. A selection committee consisting of prominent researchers in the fields of interest will select the recipients of the awards. SATELLITE EVENT The Young Researchers' Roundtable on Spoken Dialogue Systems, a SIGDIAL satellite event, is also to be held at QMUL, on September 13-14 (i.e. immediately following the main conference). This is an annual workshop designed for students, post docs, and junior researchers working in research related to spoken dialogue systems in both academia and industry. IMPORTANT DATES (SUBJECT TO CHANGE) Submission: May 4, 2009 Notification of acceptance: June 28, 2009 Final submission: July 17, 2009 Conference: September 11-12, 2009 Young Researchers' Roundtable: September 13-14, 2009 WEBSITES SIGDIAL 2009 conference website: http://www.sigdial.org/workshops/workshop10/ SIGDIAL organization website: http://www.sigdial.org/ Interspeech 2009 website: http://www.interspeech2009.org/ Young Researchers' Roundtable website: http://www.yrrsds.org/ ORGANIZING COMMITTEE For any questions, please contact the appropriate members of the organizing committee: GENERAL CO-CHAIRS Pat Healey (Queen Mary University of London): ph@dcs.qmul.ac.uk Roberto Pieraccini (SpeechCycle): roberto@speechcycle.com TECHNICAL PROGRAM CO-CHAIRS Donna Byron (Northeastern University): dbyron@ccs.neu.edu Steve Young (University of Cambridge): sjy@eng.cam.ac.uk LOCAL CHAIR Matt Purver (Queen Mary University of London): mpurver@dcs.qmul.ac.uk SIGDIAL PRESIDENT Tim Paek (Microsoft Research): timpaek@microsoft.com SIGDIAL VICE PRESIDENT Amanda Stent (AT&T Labs - Research): amanda.stent@gmail.com TECHNICAL PROGRAM COMMITTEE Gregory Aist Arizona State University, USA Jan Alexandersson DFKI GmbH, Germany Jason Baldridge University of Texas at Austin, USA Srinivas Bangalore AT&T Labs - Research, USA Dan Bohus Microsoft Research, USA Johan Bos Universitŕ di Roma "La Sapienza", Italy Charles Calloway University of Edinburgh, UK Rolf Carlson Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Sweden Mark Core University of Southern California, USA David DeVault University of Southern California, USA Myroslava Dzikovska University of Edinburgh, UK Markus Egg Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, Netherlands Stephanie Elzer Millersville University, USA Mary Ellen Foster Technical University Munich, Germany Kallirroi Georgila University of Edinburgh, UK Jonathan Ginzburg King's College London, UK Genevieve Gorrell Sheffield University, UK Alexander Gruenstein Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA Pat Healey Queen Mary University of London, UK Mattias Heldner Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Sweden Beth Ann Hockey University of California at Santa Cruz, USA Kristiina Jokinen University of Helsinki, Finland Arne Jonsson University of Linköping, Sweden Simon Keizer University of Cambridge, UK John Kelleher Dublin Institute of Technology, Ireland Alexander Koller University of Edinburgh, UK Ivana Kruijff-Korbayová Universität des Saarlandes, Germany Staffan Larsson Göteborg University, Sweden Gary Geunbae Lee Pohang University of Science and Technology, Korea Fabrice Lefevre University of Avignon, France Oliver Lemon University of Edinburgh, UK James Lester North Carolina State University, USA Diane Litman University of Pittsburgh, USA Ramón López-Cózar University of Granada, Spain François Mairesse University of Cambridge, UK Michael McTear University of Ulster, UK Wolfgang Minker University of Ulm, Germany Sebastian Möller Deutsche Telekom Labs and Technical University Berlin, Germany Vincent Ng University of Texas at Dallas, USA Tim Paek Microsoft Research, USA Patrick Paroubek LIMSI-CNRS, France Roberto Pieraccini SpeechCycle, USA Paul Piwek Open University, UK Rashmi Prasad University of Pennsylvania, USA Matt Purver Queen Mary University of London, UK Laurent Romary INRIA, France Alex Rudnicky Carnegie Mellon University, USA Yoshinori Sagisaka Waseda University, Japan Ruhi Sarikaya IBM Research, USA Candy Sidner BAE Systems AIT, USA Ronnie Smith East Carolina University, USA Amanda Stent AT&T Labs - Research, USA Matthew Stone Rutgers University, USA Matthew Stuttle Toshiba Research, UK Joel Tetreault Educational Testing Service, USA Jason Williams AT&T Labs - Research, USA