Topics of Interest

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

1. Discourse Processing and Dialogue 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 dialogue systems including topics such as:

Dialogue 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

2. Corpora, Tools and Methodology

Corpus-based work on discourse and spoken, text-based or 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: 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);
Models of discourse/dialogue structure +/- referential and relational structure;
Prosody in discourse and dialogue;
Models of presupposition, accommodation, or conversational implicature.
Grounded semantics in situated dialogue

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 dialogue and discourse processing technology in

The applications of dialogue and discourse processing technology in
Training and education/tutoring systems
Entertainment and gaming applications
Online chatting, blog, and social network analysis
Human robot interaction

Special Theme

There has been an increasing amount of work in enabling situated dialogue in both the virtual world (e.g., human agent dialogue in a game environment) and the physical environment (e.g., human robot dialogue). For example, the GIVE challenge has provided benchmarks and evaluations for instruction generation in 3D virtual environments. More recently, the AAAI 2010 Fall Symposium on Dialogue with Robots brought together researchers from different disciplines who brainstormed challenges and future directions in situated human robot dialogue. To continue the momentum and encourage broader participation in SIGDIAL, this year we will have a special theme on "situated dialogue". We invite submissions that address any aspect of this special topic.