LINGUIST List 12.875

Wed Mar 28 2001

Calls: Ling Form/Human Behavior, Discourse/Dialogue

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

Directory

1. Joseph Davis, Interaction of Linguistic Form and Meaning with Human Behavior
2. Jan van Kuppevelt, Discourse and Dialogue (SIGdial 2001)

CALL FOR PAPERS

7th International Columbia School Conference
on the Interaction of
Linguistic Form and Meaning with Human Behavior

February 16-18, 2002
Columbia University
New York, New York


Invited Speakers:

Joan Bybee
University of New Mexico

Melissa Bowerman
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics

Alan Huffman
City University of New York

Papers are invited on any aspect of linguistic analysis in which the
postulation of meaningful signals plays a central role in explaining
the distribution of linguistic forms.

The Columbia School is a group of linguists developing the theoretical
framework originally established by the late William Diver. Language
is seen as a symbolic tool whose structure is shaped both by its
communicative function and by the characteristics of its human users.
Grammatical analyses account for the distribution of linguistic forms
as an interaction between linguistic meaning and pragmatic and
functional factors such as inference, ease of processing, and
iconicity. Phonological analyses explain the syntagmatic and
paradigmatic distribution of phonological units within signals, also
drawing on both communicative function and human physiological and
psychological characteristics.

Please submit:

o	3 copies of a one-page anonymous abstract (optional
second page for references, examples, tables, etc.) to
the address below.
o	A 3x5 inch index card with the following
information:
	-	Title of paper
	-	Author's name and affiliation
	-	Address, phone, e-mail, for notification

E-mailed abstracts should include all the above
information, which will be deleted before the
abstracts are reviewed.

Address for hard-copy abstracts and other
correspondence:
Professor Radmila Gorup
Department of Slavic Languages
Columbia University
New York, NY 10027

Address for e-mailed abstracts:
Professor Joseph Davis, City College of New York: 
jsphdvsyahoo.com

DEADLINE FOR RECEIPT OF ABSTRACTS: 28 SEPTEMBER 2001

The language of the conference is English. Papers
delivered in languages other than English will be
considered.


* * * * * * * *

Sponsored by
The Department of Slavic Languages
Columbia University

The support of
The Columbia School Linguistic Society
is gratefully acknowledged

* * * * * * * *

Selected Columbia School bibliography:

Contini-Morava, Ellen, and Barbara Sussman Goldberg. 
1995. Meaning as Explanation: Advances in Linguistic
Sign Theory. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 
(Selections.)

Contini-Morava, Ellen, and Yishai Tobin. 2000. 
Between Grammar and Lexicon. Amsterdam: John
Benjamins. (Selections.)

Huffman, Alan. 1997. The Categories of Grammar: 
French lui and le. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Reid, Wallis. 1991. Verb and Noun Number in English:
 A Functional Explanation. London: Longman.

Tobin, Yishai. 1997. Phonology as Human Behavior: 
Theoretical Implications and Clinical Applications. 
Durham: Duke U Press.

 2nd 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 Kluwer Academic Publishers.

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.

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