5th SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue 2004

Last Call for Papers
5th SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue
Cambridge/MA, April 30 and May 1, 2004
(immediately preceding HLT-NAACL)

Continuing with a series of successful workshops in Hong Kong, Aalborg, Philadelphia, and Sapporo this workshop spans the ACL and ISCA SIGdial interest area of discourse and dialogue. This series provides a regular forum for the presentation of research in this area to both the larger SIGdial community as well as researchers outside this community. The workshop is organized by SIGdial, which is sponsored jointly by ACL and ISCA.

SIGdial04 will be held from Friday April 30 to Saturday May 1 at the MIT faculty club, Cambridge/MA.

Invited Speaker

We are pleased to announce that Justine Cassell, Northwestern University, Chicago/IL has agreed to be invited speaker at SIGdial04.

Topics of Interest

We welcome formal, corpus-based, implementational or analytical work on discourse and dialogue including but not restricted to the following three themes:

1. Discourse Processing and Dialogue Systems

Discourse semantic and pragmatic issues in NLP applications such as text summarization, question answering, information retrieval including topics like:

Discourse structure, temporal structure, information structure
Discourse markers, cues and particles and their use
(Co-)Reference and anaphora resolution, metonymy and bridging resolution
Subjectivity, opinions and semantic orientation

Spoken, multi-modal, and text/web based dialogue systems including topics such as:

Dialogue management models;
Speech and gesture, text and graphics integration;
Strategies for preventing, detecting or handling miscommunication (repair and correction types, clarification and under-specificity, grounding and feedback strategies);
Utilizing prosodic information for understanding and for disambiguation;

2. Corpora, Tools and Methodology

Corpus-based work on discourse and spoken, text-based and multi-modal dialogue including its support, in particular:

Annotation tools and coding schemes;
Data resources for discourse and dialogue studies;
Corpus-based techniques and analysis (including machine learning);
Evaluation of systems and components, including methodology, metrics and case studies;

3. 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);
Models of discourse/dialogue structure and their relation to referential and relational structure;
Prosody in 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 long papers for full plenary presentation as well as short papers and demonstrations. Short papers and demo descriptions will be featured in short plenary presentations, followed by posters and demonstrations.

Long papers must be no longer than 8 pages, including title, 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.
Short papers and demo descriptions should be 4 pages or less (including title, examples, references, etc.)

Submission format: Submissions must be electronic in PDF format and should follow the format of ACL proceedings (except that SIGdial04 submissions should include author information since reviewing will not be blind). Authors are strongly encouraged to use the LaTeX style files or MSWord equivalents available on the HLT/NAACL website.

Submission procedure: A PDF file of the paper must be uploaded onto the system by January 12, 2004 via the SIGdial04 submission webpage available from http://sigdial04.eml-research.de. Authors who cannot submit a PDF file electronically should contact the program chairs in advance of the paper submission deadline.

Requirements: Papers that have been or will be submitted to other meetings or publications must provide this information (see submission format); in the event of multiple acceptances, authors must notify the program chairs as to the meeting they choose to present their work by February 23, 2004, at the latest in order for their work to be included in the proceedings. SIGdial 04 cannot accept for publication or presentation work that will be (or has been) published elsewhere.

Authors are encouraged to make illustrative materials available, on the web or otherwise. For example, excerpts of recorded conversations, recordings of human-computer dialogues, interfaces to working systems, etc.

Important Dates (subject to change)

Submission	January 15, 2004, 9 a.m. (CET)
	January 12, 2004
Notification	February 16, 2004
Final submissions	March 08, 2004
Workshop	April 30-May 01, 2004

Websites

Workshop website: http://sigdial04.eml-research.de
Sigdial website: http://www.sigdial.org
HLT-NAACL04 website: http://www.hlt-naacl04.org

Contact

Email: [email protected]

Program Committee

Michael Strube, EML Research gGmbH, Germany (co-chair)
Candy Sidner, MERL, USA (co-chair)
Jan Alexandersson, DFKI, Germany
Johan Bos, University of Edinburgh, UK
Sandra Carberry, University of Delaware, USA
Jean Carletta, University of Edinburgh, UK
Justine Cassell, Northwestern University, USA
Jennifer Chu-Carroll, IBM Research, USA
Mark Core, University of Edinburgh, UK
Deborah Dahl, Conversational Technologies, USA
Renato DeMori, Universite d'Avignon, France
Sadaoki Furui, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan
Sanda Harabagiu, University of Texas at Dallas, USA
Koiti Hasida, Sony/AIST, Japan
Beth Ann Hockey, RIACS, USA
Amy Isard, University of Edinburgh, UK
Masato Ishizaki, University of Tokyo, Japan
Michael Johnston, AT&T; Research, USA
Pamela Jordan, University of Pittsburgh, USA
Andrew Kehler, University of California San Diego, USA
Staffan Larsson, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
Susann Luperfoy, Stottler Henke Associates, USA
Erwin Marsi, University of Tilburg, The Netherlands
Tim Paek, Microsoft Research, USA
Catherine Pelachaud, Universite de Paris 8, France
Massimo Poesio, University of Essex, UK
Matthew Purver, Kings College London, UK
Alex Rudnicky, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
David Schlangen, University of Potsdam, Germany
Elizabeth Shriberg, SRI and ICSI, USA
Ronnie Smith, East Carolina University, USA
Manfred Stede, University of Potsdam, Germany
Oliviero Stock, ITC-IRST, Italy
Richmond Thomason, University of Michigan, USA
Syun Tutiya, Chiba University, Japan
Renata Vieira, UNISINOS, Brasil
Bonnie Webber, University of Edinburgh, UK
Janyce Wiebe, University of Pittsburgh, USA
Massimo Zancanaro, ITC-IRST, Italy
Michelle Zhou, IBM Research, USA

Last Call for Papers 5th SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue Cambridge/MA, April 30 and May 1, 2004 (immediately preceding HLT-NAACL)