7th SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue 2006

Final Announcement

7th SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue
Sydney, July 15-16, 2006

Continuing with a series of successful workshops in Hong Kong, Aalborg, Philadelphia, Sapporo and Lisboa 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 or analytical work on discourse and dialogue including but not restricted to the following three 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 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.

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 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 aim to be 4 pages or less (including title, examples, references, etc.).

Please use the official COLING/ACL style files.

Submission/Reviewing will be managed by the START system. To submit a paper, please follow this link.

Papers that have been or will be submitted to other meetings or publications must provide this information (see submission format). SIGdial 06 cannot accept for publication or presentation work that will be (or has been) published elsewhere.

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.