LINGUIST List 12.1217

Wed May 2 2001

Calls: Discourse & Dialogue, Michigan Ling Society

Editor for this issue: Lydia Grebenyova <lydialinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Jan van Kuppevelt, Discourse and Dialogue - SIGDIAL 2001 Workshop
2. Veronica Grondona, Michigan Linguistic Society

 - FINAL CALL FOR PAPERS -

 2nd ACL SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue
 Aalborg, Denmark, September 1-2
 (Just before Eurospeech 2001-Scandinavia)

 More up to date information on submission schedule,
 formats, registration and program committee may be
 found at the workshop website

DESCRIPTION

Following up on the successful 1st Workshop in Hong Kong in October 2000,
this will be the next in a series of workshops spanning the ACL 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, until this series there has not been a regular place
for such research to be presented in a forum to receive attention from the
larger SIGdial community and researchers outside this community.

INVITED SPEAKERS: to be announced.

TOPICS OF INTEREST

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
 (specific subproblems or general modeling, in particular
 models for mixed initiative and user-adaptive dialogue);
 * speech, text, and graphics integration (for
 understanding or generation);
 * context-based interpretation and/or response planning,in
 particular how this contributes to natural interaction;
 * strategies for handling or preventing miscommuncation
 (repair and correction types, clarification and
 underspecificity, grounding and feedback strategies);
 * utilizing prosodic information for various types of
 disambiguation;
 * task-driven versus conversational dialogue;
 * evaluation of dialogue systems including task complexity
 measurements.

(ii) Corpora and Corpus Tools
 Corpus-based work on discourse and spoken, text-based
 and multi-modal dialogue including its support, in
 particular:
 * issues and problems in discourse and dialogue
 annotation;
 * techniques (including machine learning), tools, coding
 schemes and data resources for discourse and dialogue
 studies;
 * XML-based tools for dialogue access to internet
 information.

(iii) 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);
 * incremental (plan-based,topic-based, etc.) models of
 discourse/dialogue structure integrating referential and
 relational structure;
 * modeling genre-specific aspects of discourse and
 dialogue structure, including the specific structural
 aspects of (interactive) digital media;
 * prosody in discourse and dialogue;
 * modeling politeness and non-recursive parts of 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 papers for full plenary
presentation. The papers must be no longer than 10 pages, including title
page, 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.

Besides papers for full plenary presentation, we encourage the submission
of short 4-page papers (inclusive title page, examples, references, etc.)
to be combined with a short presentation in the plenary session and a
poster presentation.

Full papers and short papers should be sent electronically to the e-mail
address sigdial2001ims.uni-stuttgart.de and must be received no later
than May 7.

The format to use for papers and abstracts is the same (ACL final paper
format). Stylefiles are available at the workshop webpage:
http://www.sigdial.org/sigdialworkshop01. Papers must be submitted in pdf
(preferred) or postscript format.

The title page (no separate title page is needed) should include the
following information:

 - Title;
 - Authors' names, affiliations, and email addresses;
 - Abstract (short summary up to 15 lines).

IMPORTANT DATES

Submission of full papers and short papers May 7
Notification June 20
Final submissions August 1
Workshop September 1-2

WORKSHOP PUBLICATIONS

Like full papers, short papers will be published in the workshop
proceedings. Authors of a selected number of full papers accepted for the
workshop proceedings will be asked to send in a version of their paper for
the publication in a book on current directions and developments in
discourse and dialogue, to be published by Kluwer Academic Publishers.

PANEL SESSIONS

In addition to regular paper and abstract submisions, the program
committee of the 2nd ACL SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue
organizes the following two panel sessions for which they invite
proposals. Deadline for submissions is June 4, 2001.

Panel Session I

Spoken Dialogue Systems: Theory that is Ready for Practice

For this panel session, we invite submissions that focus on ideas whose
theory, being of syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, corpus-linguistic,
statistic and/or prosodic nature, has been studied in great detail and
that is ready or at least has a clear potential to be included in the next
advance of spoken dialogue systems. Submission format should follow the
same guidelines as plenary papers and should contain the following
content:

- - a synopsis of the idea with appropriate references;
- - a description of problem domains where an implemented system could
 make good use of the idea;
- - a description of how the idea's utility could be evaluated;
- - (optional) a description of necessary technologies.

Questions may be directed to Ronnie Smith/Jan van Kuppevelt
 <sigdial2001ims.uni-stuttgart.de>

Panel Session II

Discourse Structure and Conversational Implicatures

For this panel session, we invite submissions on operational models of
conversational implicatures which focus on their discourse-structural
status. Possible topics of interest for this panel discussion are: the
nature of conversational implicatures and their relation to
presuppositional inferences, discourse-structural (rhetorical,
referential, etc.) constraints on the generation and interpretation of
conversational implicatures, question-focus and (particularized vs.
generalized) conversational implicatures, conversational implicatures and
prosody, conversational implicatures and (underspecified vs. optimal)
linguistic form, e.g. the form of referring expressions, and
conversational implicatures in the context of dynamic, topic- or
goal-related discourse processing. Submission format should follow the
same guidelines as plenary papers and should contain the following
content:

- - a synopsis of the operational model with appropriate
 references;
- - a description of main topics for the panel discussion;
- - a set of topic-related position statements.

Questions may be directed to Jan van Kuppevelt/Ronnie Smith
 <sigdial2001ims.uni-stuttgart.de>

EXHIBITION

The workshop will host exhibitions of books and journals related to the
themes of the workshop. Details will be announced later at the workshop
website. Interested parties should contact the local workshop organization
for registration (see below).

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Co-Chairs: Jan van Kuppevelt (University of Stuttgart) and Ronnie Smith
(East Carolina University)

Besides SIGdial organization members (Jennifer Chu-Carroll, IBM TJ Watson
Research Center; Morena Danieli, Loquendo; Laila Dybkjaer, University of
Odense; Diana Litman, AT&T Labs Research; Akira Shimazu, JAIST; Michael
Strube, European Media Laboratory; David Traum, University of Southern
California) the program committee consists of the following external
members:

James Allen (Univ. of Rochester) Masahito Kawamori (NTT
Alan Biermann (Duke University) Communication Science Labs)
Steven Bird (Univ. of Pennsylvania) Christine Nakatani (Nuance Comm.)
Sandra Carberry (Univ. of Delaware) Massimo Poesio (Univ. of Edinburgh)
Rolf Carlson (KTH, Stockholm) Alex Rudnicky (Carnegie Mellon
Phil Cohen (Oregon Graduate Inst.) University)
Robin Cooper (Gothenburg Univ.)* David Sadek (France Telecom R&D)
John Dowding (RIACS) Candy Sidner (MERL, Cambridge, MA)
James Glass (MIT)* Mark Steedman (Univ. of Edinburgh)
Carlos Gussenhoven (Nijmegen Univ.) Martin Stokhof (Univ. of Amsterdam)
Peter Heeman (Oregon Graduate Inst.) Oliviero Stock (IRST)
Julia Hirschberg (AT&T Labs Research) Nigel Ward (Univ. of Tokyo)
Lynette Hirschman (MITRE) Annie Zaenen (Xerox Research Centre
Hans Kamp (Univ. of Stuttgart) Europe)

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

Laila Dybkjaer (local chair), David Traum, Julia Hirschberg, Ronnie Smith,
Jan van Kuppevelt.

CONTACT INFORMATION

Questions about submission: Ronnie Smith/Jan van Kuppevelt
 <sigdial2001ims.uni-stuttgart.de>
Questions about local issues: Laila Dybkjaer <lailanis.sdu.dk>
Miscellaneous: David Traum <traumcs.umd.edu>


* Not yet confirmed

CALL FOR PAPERS

Annual Meeting of the Michigan Linguistic Society

Saturday, October 27, 2001
Eastern Michigan University
Ypsilanti, Michigan

Keynote Speaker: To be announced.

Abstracts are invited in all areas of linguistics for the Annual Meeting
of the Michigan Linguistic Society. Presentations will be fifteen minutes
in length plus five minutes for discussion.

Abstract submission guidelines:
* Abstracts should be limited to 500 words excluding references.
* The title of the abstract should appear at the top of the abstract
 and the author's name, abstract title, affiliation and email address
 should appear on a separate page.
* Abstracts should be submitted by email to mlsemunix.emich.edu as part
 of the message text, or as a Word file attachment.
* Abstracts may also be submitted in hard copy form by faxing three
 copies to the attention of MLS Abstract Review Committee at
 734-483-9744 or mailing three copies to MLS 2001, Linguistics Program,
 Department of English Language and Literature, Ypsilanti, MI 48197
* E-mail submission is strongly encouraged. Abstracts received after
* Deadline for RECEIPT of abstracts is September 10, 2001. Abstracts
 received after September 10, 2001, will not be considered.

Abstracts will be reviewed anonymously, and notification of acceptance
will be sent by September 17, 2001. Registration and conference
information will appear on the website of the Linguistics Program,
Department of English Language and Literature, Eastern Michigan
University-- http://www.emich.edu/public/lingprog

For further information about Eastern Michigan University, including a
campus map, see http://www.emich.edu

Hope to see you all in October,

Veronica Grondona

Veronica Grondona
Linguistics Program
Department of English Language and Literature
Eastern Michigan University
Ypsilanti, MI 48197

grondonaemunix.emich.edu
734-487-0145 (voice)
734-483-9744 (fax)