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Editor for this issue: Jody Huellmantel <jodylinguistlist.org>
cs.rutgers.edu>CALL FOR PAPERS 1ST SIGDIAL WORKSHOP ON DISCOURSE AND DIALOGUE Including Theme Session on Principles for Dialogue System Evaluation *********** submission deadline extended to July 17 *********** 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
chibcha.demon.co.uk>The University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand, and the Xunta de Galicia (government of Galicia, Spain) are hosting an international conference on societal bilingualism, focusing on heritage and indigenous languages, to be held at the University of Wailkato on the 24th - 26th November, 2000. The four themes are as follows. 1. Language Policy. This theme encompasses the official status of indigenous languages, legislation, linguistic Rights, normalisation, and the promotion of the use of the minority languages through the public media. 2. Bilingual Education. The fundamental role of of the education system for the many societies whose goal is the maintenance of an indigeneous and/or heritage language. Topics open for discussion include the provision of vernacular education at any level and the training of teachers for immersion and bilingual models. 3. Language Development. The systematic development of vocabulary to equip languages for new roles and to keep pace with advances in knowledge raises methodological as well as policy issues.Problems in the dissemination and reception of newly defined terminology also arise. 4. Globalisation and minorty indigenous languages. The tensions ibncreasing internationalisation and the need for lingue franche on the one hand, and on the other, the role of minority and indigenous languages in the self identification of peoples are experinced in many societies. The need to achieve balance in satisfying these pressures has implications for all areas of language planning and maintenance. The conference will invite keynote speakers in these areas as well as provide the opportunity for participants to present their own research and atudies within the context of parallel thematic sessions, workshops and plenaries. Contributions in the form of shorter (20 minutes plus 10 minutes for discussion) or longer (30 minutes plus 15 minutes for discussion) or longer (30 minutes plus 15 minutes for discussion) papers, poster presentations, roundtable discussions are very welcome. Accommodation will be available at the University's halls of residence and at the University's marae. The marae is the centre of Maori community life and consists of an open space for format ceremonies of welcome and a number of buildings. The most important of these is the meeting house in which people meet to talk and to entertain guests, and in which all sleep communally. For those who prefer it, accommodation can also be booked privately in nearby motels. It would be greatly appreciated by the organisers if prospective participants could indicate their interest in attending and contributing as soon as possible. If you would like accommodation in the University's halls of residence, or alternatively you would like accommodation at the University's marae, or would prefer accommodation in a motel, please supply list and contacts. In addition, should you be interested in presenting a paper, please submit the title, an abstract of up to 150 words by 31st MS^rch 2000, preferably in electron form to: biling2000Mail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue