2nd SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue

Topics of Interest
Panel Sessions
Submission of Papers and Abstracts
Important Dates
Organizing Committee
Program Committee
Speakers
Program
Proceedings
Contact

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 subproblems or general modeling, in particular models for mixed initiative and user-adaptive dialogue);
   • speech, text, and graphics integration (for understanding or generation);
   • context-based interpretation and/or response planning,in particular how this contributes to natural interaction;
   • strategies for handling or preventing miscommuncation (repair and correction types, clarification and underspecificity, grounding and feedback strategies);
   • utilizing prosodic information for various types of disambiguation;
   • task-driven versus conversational dialogue;
   • evaluation of dialogue systems including task complexity measurements.
2. Corpora and Corpus Tools
   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;
   • techniques (including machine learning), tools, coding schemes and data resources for discourse and dialogue studies;
   • XML-based tools for dialogue access to internet information.
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 papers for full plenary presentation. The 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.

Besides papers for full plenary presentation, we encourage the submission of short 4-page papers (inclusive title page, examples, references, etc.) to be combined with a short presentation in the plenary session and a poster presentation.

Full papers and short papers should be sent electronically to the e-mail address sigdial2001@ims.uni-stuttgart.de and must be received no later than May 21 (extended deadline).

The format to use for papers and abstracts is the same (ACL final paper format). Stylefiles are available. Papers must be submitted in pdf (preferred) or postscript format.

The title page (no separate title page is needed) should include the following information:

Title: Authors' names, affiliations, and email addresses; Abstract (short summary up to 5 lines);

Important Dates

Submission of full papers and short papers	May 21
Notification	June 27
Final submissions	August 1
Workshop	September 1-2

Workshop Publications

Like full papers, short papers will be published in the workshop proceedings. Authors of a selected number of full papers accepted for the workshop proceedings will be asked to send in a version of their paper for the publication in a book on current directions and developments in discourse and dialogue, to be published by Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Panel Sessions

In addition to regular paper and abstract submissions, the program committee of the 2nd SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue organizes the following two panel sessions for which they invite proposals. The deadline for submissions is June 4, 2001.

Panel Session I

Spoken Dialogue Systems: Theory that is Ready for Practice

For this panel session, we invite submissions that focus on ideas whose theory, being of syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, corpus-linguistic, statistic and/or prosodic nature, has been studied in great detail and that is ready or at least has a clear potential to be included in the next advance of spoken dialogue systems. Submission format should follow the same guidelines as plenary papers and should contain the following content:

• a synopsis of the idea with appropriate references;
• a description of problem domains where an implemented system could make good use of the idea;
• a description of how the idea's utility could be evaluated;
• (optional) a description of necessary technologies;

Questions may be directed to Ronnie Smith/Jan van Kuppevelt, sigdial2001@ims.uni-stuttgart.de

Panel Session II

Discourse Structure and Conversational Implicatures

For this panel session, we invite submissions on operational models of conversational implicatures which focus on their discourse-structural status. Possible topics of interest for this panel discussion are: the nature of conversational implicatures and their relation to presuppositional inferences, discourse-structural (rhetorical, referential, etc.) constraints on the generation and interpretation of conversational implicatures, question-focus and (particularized vs. generalized) conversational implicatures, conversational implicatures and (underspecified vs. optimal) linguistic form, e.g. the form of referring expressions, and conversational implicatures in the context of dynamic, topic- or goal-related discourse processing. Submission format should follow the same guidelines as plenary papers and should contain the following content:

• a synopsis of the operational model with appropriate references;
• a description of main topics for the panel discussion;
• a set of topic-related position statements;

Questions may be directed to Jan van Kuppevelt/Ronnie Smith, sigdial2001@ims.uni-stuttgart.de