4nd SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue

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Announcement

4th SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue

Sapporo, July 5 and 6, 2003

(immediately preceding the 41st annual meeting of the ACL)

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Continuing with a series of successful workshops in Hong Kong, Aalborg and Philadelphia, this workshop spans the ACL and ISCA SIGdial interest area of discourse and dialogue. This series provides a regular forum for the presentation of research in this area to both the larger SIGdial community as well as researchers outside this community. The workshop is organized by SIGdial, which is sponsored jointly by ACL and ISCA.

Topics of Interest

We welcome formal, corpus-based, implementational and analytical work on discourse and dialogue, with a focus on the following three themes:

(1) Dialogue Systems

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

Dialogue management models (specific sub-problems or general modeling, in particular models for mixed initiative and user-adaptive dialogue);
Speech and gesture, text and graphics integration (for understanding or generation);
Context-based interpretation of dialogues and/or response planning, in particular how this contributes to natural interaction;
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;
Contrasts between task-driven and conversational dialogue.

(2) Corpora, Tools and Methodology

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

Issues and problems in discourse and dialogue annotation;
Annotation tools and coding schemes;
Data resources for discourse and dialogue studies;
Corpus-based techniques and analysis (including machine learning);
Tools (XML-based and other) for dialogue system building;
Evaluation of dialogue systems, 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);
Incremental (plan-based, topic-based, etc.) models of discourse/dialogue structure integrating referential and relational structure;
Modeling genre-specific aspects of discourse and dialogue structure, including the specific structural aspects of (interactive) digital media;
Prosody in discourse and dialogue;
Modeling politeness and non-recursive parts of discourse and dialogue;
Models of presupposition and accommodation; operational models of conversational implicature.

Submission of Papers and Abstracts

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 10 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.
Short papers and demo descriptions should aim to be 5 pages or less (including title page, examples, references, etc.)

Authors are encouraged to make illustrative materials available, on the web or otherwise. For example, excerpts of recorded conversations, recordings of human-computer dialogues, interfaces to working systems, etc.

Both long papers and short papers should be sent electronically to the e-mail address: sigdial2003@cs.cmu.edu and must be received no later than March 27^th.

The format to use for papers and abstracts is the same (and is the 2003 ACL final paper format). Style files and additional instructions are available at http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/sigdial2003/templates/

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;

Keywords;

Abstract (short summary up to 5 lines);

Important Dates

Submission	March 27, 2003
Notification	April 28, 2003
Final submissions	May 23, 2003
Workshop	July 5-6, 2003

Websites

Workshop website: http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/sigdial2003/

Sigdial website: http://www.sigdial.org/

ACL website: http://www.ec-inc.co.jp/ACL2003/

Workshop Publications

All accepted papers will be published in the workshop proceedings and will subsequently be available on the SIGdial web site.

Program Committee

Alexander Rudnicky, Carnegie Mellon University (co-chair), air@cs.cmu.edu

Syun Tutiya, Chiba University (co-chair), tutiya@chiba-u.ac.jp

Donna Byron (Ohio State University)

Phil Cohen (Oregon Health University/OGI)

Nils Dahlbeck (Linköpings Universitet)

Yasuharu Den (Chiba University)

Joakim Gustafson (Telia)

Masato Ishizaki (JAIST)

Yasuhiro Katagiri (ATR MIC)

Masahito Kawamori (Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Co.)

Andreas Kellner (Philips)

Ali Knott (Otago University)

Ivana Kruijff-Korbayova (Universität des Saarlandes)

Tomoko Kumagai (National Institute for Japanese Language)

Alex Lascarides (University of Edinburgh)

Lin-Shan Lee (National Taiwan University)

Oliver Lemon (Stanford University)

Wolfgang Minker (University of Ulm)

Mikio Nakano (Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Co.)

Shrikanth Narayanan (USC)

Roberto Pieraccini (SpeechWorks Int.)

Massimo Poesio (University of Edinburgh)

Alexandros Potamianos (Technical University of Crete)

Norbert Reithinger (DFKI)

Laurent Romary (LORIA)

Yoshinori Sagisaka (Waseda University)

Candace L. Sidner (MERL)

Michael Strube (European Media Laboratory)

Jan Wiebe (Univ. of Pittsburgh)

Bo Xu (Chinese Academy of Science)

Organizing Committee

Akira Kurematsu, University of Electro-Communications (general chair), kure@apple.ee.uec.ac.jp

Alexander Rudnicky, Carnegie Mellon University, air@cs.cmu.edu

Syun Tutiya, Chiba University, tutiya@chiba-u.ac.jp

Laila Dybkjær, University of Southern Denmark, laila@nis.sdu.dk

David Traum, USC Institute for Creative Technologies, traum@ict.usc.edu