LINGUIST List 12.435

Fri Feb 16 2001

Calls: Discourse/Dialogue, Predicative Morphosyntax

Editor for this issue: Jody Huellmantel <jodylinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Jan van Kuppevelt, 2nd ACL SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue
2. Delia Bentley, Predicative Morphosyntax

 1st Announcement

 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 should include the following information: 

 Title:
 Authors' names, affiliations, and email addresses:
 Keywords (up to 5 keywords specifying subject area):
 Submission type (full paper or short paper submission):
 Abstract (short summary up to 5 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 a renowned, international
publisher.

Panel Sessions

In addition to the regular paper and abstract submissions, the program
committee welcomes proposals for other relevant activities, such as
reports of working groups and initiatives, and targeted discussion
sessions. The program committee itself intends to organize two panel
sessions, the descriptions of which will be given in later announcements,
namely one specifically on spoken dialogue systems and the other on the
pragmatics/semantics of discourse and dialogue being directly relevant to
the first subject.

Program Committee

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

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>

CALL FOR PAPERS
WORKSHOP
PREDICATIVE MORPHOSYNTAX: PARAMETERS OF VARIATION IN ROMANCE

University of Palermo, 23-24 November 2001

Abstracts are invited for a workshop on Romance predicative
morphosyntax. The purpose of the workshop is to explore parametric
variation in the morphosyntax of verbal, nominal, adjectival
predicates. Space will be given to both synchronic and diachronic
analyses of any languages of the Romance family. Topics which are
likely to be covered in the workshop are: synthetic and analytic
predication, agreement systems, copulas and auxiliaries. But papers
are invited on any aspect of Romance predicative morphosyntax.

The workshop will take place in Palermo. There will be scope for a
maximum of 15 presentations of 20 minutes each followed by 10 minutes
for discussion.

Organisers: 
Ignazio Mirto, University of Palermo (ignazio.mirtolibero.it) 
Delia Bentley, University of Manchester (delia.bentleyman.ac.uk)

Keynote speakers:
Professor Carol Rosen, Cornell University
Professor Nigel Vincent, University of Manchester

Abstracts
One page abstracts should be sent to either of the above e-mail
addresses by 31 May 2001. Notification of acceptance will be given by
22 June 2001.

For further details see our website:
http://www.unipa.it/~lendi/workshop.htm



Dr Delia Bentley
Department of Linguistics
University of Manchester
Oxford Rd
M13 9PL
GB
Tel. +44 +161 +2753193
Fax +44 +161 +2753187
e-mail: delia.bentleyman.ac.uk