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csl.sony.co.jp>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 http://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 dialcalMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue
cs.rutgers.edu>FINAL CALL FOR PAPERS (EMNLP/VLC-2000) JOINT SIGDAT CONFERENCE ON EMPIRICAL METHODS IN NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING AND VERY LARGE CORPORA Sponsored by SIGDAT (ACL's Special Interest Group for Linguistic Data and Corpus-based Approaches to NLP) October 7-8, 2000 Hong Kong University of Science and Technology In conjunction with ACL-2000: The 38th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics This conference aims to bring together academic researchers and industrial practitioners to discuss empirical and corpus-based natural language processing through technical paper sessions, invited talks, and panel discussions. Topics of interest include (but are not limited to): * statistical parsing * language and dialog models * machine translation * information retrieval * information extraction * comparative evaluation of empirical vs. rule- and knowledge-based technologies * lexical acquisition * statistical language understanding * phrase identification * noun phrase coreference * question answering * word sense disambiguation * word and term segmentation and extraction * alignment * bilingual lexicon extraction * text categorization This year, we are especially interested in papers discussing these topics in the context of web-oriented applications. - ------------------------------------------------------------------------- SUBMISSIONS Submissions are limited to original, unpublished and empirically evaluated work. Reviewing of papers will be blind. Electronic submissions are required; author instructions, stylesheets and a web-based submissions interface may be found at http://nlp.cs.jhu.edu/~sigdat2k . Submitted papers should conform to the colacl.sty style file (or the provided MSWord equivalent) for final 2-column format, with the exception that name, affiliation and address should be replaced with 'XXX'. Full paper-length submissions are strongly encouraged, and should not exceed 9 pages in specified format. Submissions must be received on or before June 30, 2000. - ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Important Dates: June 30 Submission of full-length paper July 28 Acceptance notice August 29 Camera-ready paper due October 7-8 Conference date - ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Program Committee Chair: Hinrich Schuetze, GroupFire (hinrichMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue