Call information

Description
General Session Topics
Theme Session Topics
Submission of Extended Abstracts
Submission of Final Papers
Important Dates
Committee
Accepted Submissions
Final Workshop Program
Proceedings

Description:

There has been a perceived need in the SigDIAL Community for a regular workshop spanning the SigDIAL interest area of discourse and dialogue. While there has been a lot of activity in this area, and fairly frequent "specialty" workshops on various sub-top ics, there has not been a regular place for such research to be presented in a forum to receive attention from the larger SigDIAL community. This workshop is intended to be the first in a regular series. A general session, open to the range of workin the area is to be combined with a Specialty "Theme Session", in this case on Principles for Dialogue System Evaluation.

Topics of Interest for the General Session

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

(i) Dialogue Systems
Spoken, multi-modal, and text/web based dialogue systems including topics such as:

dialogue management models
task complexity and interfaces for less common and less expected tasks
repair, clarification and correction types
grounding and feedback strategies
user and user group modeling
mixed initiative and user-adaptive dialogue
re-usable components for different systems
generic architectures and common toolkits for building dialogue systems
speech, text and graphics integration

(ii) Corpora and Corpus Tools
Support for corpus-based work on discourse and dialogue, in particular

issues in discourse and dialogue annotation
tools and resources for discourse and dialogue studies
XML-based tools for dialogue access to internet information

(iii) Pragmatic and/or Semantic Modeling

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

ellipsis and anaphora
dependent reference
presupposition and accommodation
genres of discourse and dialogue

b. Specific aspects of discourse and dialogue structure, in particular

dialogue acts
rhetorical structure
prosody and discourse
temporal structure
topic-comment structure in discourse and dialogue
focus and the distribution of discourse referents
discourse structure and conversational implicatures

Topics of Interest for the Theme Session on Principles for Evaluation of Dialogue Systems

As a special-theme session, we wish to discuss methods for evaluation which promote fruitful research directions. Contributions in this respect are solicited on topics including but not limited to:

evaluation of task-oriented dialogue systems vs. self-oriented (amusement-oriented)dialogue systems
how to evaluate the efficiency and/or comfort of dialogues
objective, quantitative, synthetic evaluation vs. subjective, qualitative,analytic evaluation
relation of evaluation of dialogue systems with evaluation of other parts of NLP
common tools and infrastructures for evaluation
how to assess/implement diversity of dialogues in evaluation

The last topic may need further description: A generally important issue in evaluation of allegedly intelligent artifacts is how to manipulate the diversity under the present state of the art. The diversity of dialogues encompasses the vocabul ary, syntactic constructions, discourse structures, and so forth. A major source of the diversity here is the gap between linguistic expressions and the description of the world to talk about. Diverse dialogues in fact arise in tasks, such as the Ma pTask, involving pattern recognition. However, the visual pattern recognition in the Map Task makes it utterly impossible to computationally implement with the current technologies.

Submission of Final Papers

Final papers should be sent electronically to laila@nis.sdu.dk and must be received no later than Monday 4th September 2000.

The format to use is the same as for ACL final papers. Stylefiles are available under the ACL 2000 author instructions. Papers must be submitted in pdf (preferred), postscript or rtf format.

Final papers must be no longer than 10 pages, including references and appendices with example dialogues, algorithms, etc.

Important Dates

Submissions             July 17th
Notification             August 16th
Final Submissions    September 4st
Workshop              October 7-8th

Program Committee

Laila Dybkj�r (co-chair), Koiti Hasisa (co-chair), David Traum (co-chair), Niels Ole Bernsen, Phil Cohen, Morena Danieli, Yasuharu Den, Barbara Di Eugenio, Paul Heisterkamp, Lynette Hirschman, Beth Ann Hockey, Kristiina Jokinen, Pamela Jordan, Hans Kamp, Ian Lewin, Daniel Marcu, Katashi Nagao, Laurent Romary, Remko Scha, Akira Shimazu, Candace Sidner, Mark Steedman, Michael Strube, Jan van Kuppevelt, Marilyn Walker.

Contact Information

Questions about submission:                   Pamela Jordan   <dialcal@pitt.edu>
Questions about General Session:           Laila Dybkjaer <laila@nis.sdu.dk>
Questions about Theme Session:             Koiti Hasida    <hasida@etl.go.jp>
Miscellaneous and Logistical Questions: David Traum    <traum@cs.umd.edu>