LINGUIST List 10.516

Thu Apr 8 1999

Confs: NLP & Computer/Human Interaction

Editor for this issue: Karen Milligan <karenlinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Nancy Green, Computer-Human Interaction & NLP

Special Interest Group on Natural Language in Computer-Human Interaction
Thursday May 20, 1999, 9:00 am - 10:30 am (tentative day/time)

as part of 
CHI99: 1999 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
May 15-20, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
(Note: early registration deadline is April 8!)

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The goal of this SIG is to provide an opportunity for CHI99 attendees
from two research communities, natural language processing (NLP) and 
human-computer interaction (CHI), to discuss issues of mutual interest.
With the growing interest in human-computer interfaces that use
spoken or written natural language in some way, researchers and 
practitioners who work on these interfaces are finding that the two 
fields of research, CHI and NLP, are complementary and converging. 

In the CHI research community, there have been investigations on a 
number of related issues such as usability of text and graphics in 
on-line documentation (e.g., Landauer et al.; Brockmann, 1986), 
hypertext (e.g., Chen and Rada, 1996), spoken-dialogue interfaces 
(e.g., Yankelovich, Levow, G and Marx, 1995; Hansen, Novick and
Sutton, 1996; Walker et al., 1998), and language/audio resources 
(e.g., Arons, 1993). In the NLP research community, there is
increasing interest in use of natural language in intelligent
multimodal and multimedia interfaces, e.g., International Symposium 
on Spoken Dialogue (ISSD-96), COOP 98 Workshop on The Use of Herbert
H. Clark's Models of Language Use for the Design of Cooperative 
Systems, and 1998 AAAI Workshop on Representations for Multi-Modal 
Human-Computer Interaction. Although there are several annual 
conferences that provide an opportunity for the two communities to 
interact, such as the yearly International Conference on Intelligent 
User Interfaces (IUI) and the Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface 
Software and Technology (UIST), the time is right for interaction at 
their respective primary meetings, the annual conference of the 
Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and the annual CHI 
conference.

Some technical issues that may be of interest to both communities are
* For what and under what conditions is NL effective in the
 human-computer interface? 
 - For what types of tasks or communication is NL effective? 
 - How does modality influence effectiveness? 
 - How does the effectiveness of NL in computer media differ from
 its effectiveness in traditional forms of communication
 (such as face-to-face conversation and print media)? 
 - How do performance limitations of automated NL technologies 
 (e.g., speech recognition errors) influence effectiveness?
 - What approaches can be used to answer the above?
* What are the critical technical requirements for NLP to be effective
 in the human-machine interface? What technical requirements arise
 in transferring technology developed for one language to systems for
 users of another language?

We invite all members of the CHI and NLP communities attending CHI99 
who are interested in use of natural language in the human-computer 
interface. For information on registration for CHI99 see
 http://www.acm.org/sigchi/chi99/

For up-to-date information on this SIG see: 
 (site in US) http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sage/CHI99SIG.html
 (site in France) http://www-eurisco.onecert.fr/events/nlsig99.html 

SIG Organizers:
 Nancy Green, Human-Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon 
 University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
 David G. Novick, European Institute of Cognitive Sciences and
 Engineering, Toulouse, France


References
- - - ----------
Arons, B. (1993). Speech Skimmer: Interactively skimming recorded speech.
 Proceedings of UIST 93, 187-196.
Brockman, John R. Writing Better Computer User Documentation: from
 Paper to Online. John Wiley and Sons, Inc., New York, 1986.
Chen, C. and Rada, R. Interacting with Hypertext: A Meta-Analysis
 of Experimental Studies. Human-Computer Interaction, 1996, 
 v. 11, pp. 125-156.
Hansen, B., Novick, D., and Sutton, S. (1996). Systematic design of
 spoken prompts, Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
 (CHI'96), Vancouver, BC, April, 1996, 157-164.
Landauer, Thomas and Dennis Egan and Joel Remde and Michael Lesk and
 Carol Lochbaum and Daniel Ketchum. Enhancing the Usability
 of Text through Computer Delivery and Formative Evaluation: 
 the SuperBook Project, in McKnight, C. and A. Dillon and J.
 Richardson (eds), Hypertext: A Psychological Perspective, 
 New York, Ellis Horwood.
Walker, M., Fromer, J., Di Frabbrizio, G., Mestel, C., and Hindle, D.
 (1998). What can I say?: Evaluating a spoken language
 interface to email, Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 
 98), Los Angeles, CA, April, 1998, 582-589.
Yankelovich, Levow, G and Marx, M. Designing SpeechActs: Issues in
 speech user interfaces, Proceedings of Computer Human 
 Interaction, 1995, 369-376.