(Fwd) CFP: SIGDIAL WS (fwd)

CALL FOR PAPERS 1ST SIGDIAL WORKSHOP ON DISCOURSE AND DIALOGUE Including Theme Session On Principles For Dialogue System Evaluation October 7,8, 2000 Hong Kong In conjunction with ACL-2000: The 38th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics www.pitt.edu/~dialcal/ACL2Ksymp.html 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-topics, 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 work in 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 - politeness 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 vocabulary, 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 Map Task, involving pattern recognition. However, the visual pattern recognition in the Map Task makes it utterly impossible to computationally implement with the current technologies. SUBMISSIONS To stimulate discussions, both the general and theme session will feature both full paper presentations and short position/discussion papers. Please indicate the submission format, as described below. All papers should be sent electronically to dialcal(a)pitt.edu with subject line SigDIAL workshop submission. Papers should be received by July 10th to insure full consideration. FULL PAPER SUBMISSIONS are limited to original, unpublished work in the areas of interest. Extended abstracts of papers may not exceed 3200 words (exclusive of title page, example pages, and references). In addition to the regular text, 2 additional pages are allowed (as an appendix) which may include examples of extended discourse, graphical representation of discourse structure, or other supporting material. The style files for submission are the same as the ones for ACL regular papers, which can be downloaded from http://www.cs.ust.hk/acl2000/Latex/index.html (for latex) http://www.cs.ust.hk/acl2000/work/ACL2000_submission.doc (for MS Word) The title page should include the following information: Title: Authors' names, affiliations, and email addresses: Keywords: Up to 5 keywords specifying subject area (preferably from lists above) Which Session: General or Theme Word Count, excluding title page and references: Under Consideration for other Conferences (specify): Abstract: short summary (up to 5 lines) SHORT PAPER SUBMISSIONS Short papers should be in the same format as long papers, but no more than 2000 words (with similar final length). As well as original work in progress, short papers may also involve positions on the topics above, comparative analysis of other approaches, or new relevant topics for discussion. IMPORTANT DATES Submissions July 10th Notification August 10th Final Submissions September 1st Workshop October 7-8th PROGRAM COMMITTEE: Laila Dybkjaer (co-chair), Koiti Hasisa (co-chair), David Traum (co-chair), Morena Danielli, Yasuharu Den, Barbara Di Eugenio, Kristiina Jokinen, Pamela Jordan, Ian Lewin, Daniel Marcu, Katashi Nagao, Akira Shimazu, Michael Strube, Jan van Kuppevelt, Marilyn Walker (and others). Contact Information: Questions about submission: Pamela Jordan <dialcal(a)pitt.edu> Questions about General Session: Laila Dybkjaer <laila(a)nis.sdu.dk> Questions about Theme Session: Koiti Hasida <hasida(a)etl.go.jp> Miscellaneous and Logistical Questions: David Traum <traum(a)cs.umd.edu>