ADVANCED TOPICS IN
MODELING NATURAL
LANGUAGE DIALOG
(Workshop at KONVENS 2004)
14 September 2004
Vienna, Austria
Natural language dialogs are increasingly important for supporting
information access and electronic commerce. It is a
not-too-distant-future vision for people to be talking to all kinds of
devices, applications and services as they move around their homes,
offices and cities. Such interfaces will need to provide natural,
intuitive and flexible interaction, and adapt to different users and
ever-changing situations.
Over the past two decades, computational dialogue modeling has made
considerable progress. However, most currently available systems
severely limit the space of possible interactions, both from the
viewpoint of dialogue strategies and input/output natural language
expressivity. This results in inflexible, boring and time-consuming
dialogues. Consequently, enhancing dialog capabilities of machine
conversants is urgently required.
The goal of this workshop is to discuss approaches that
model aspects of dialogs involved in flexible conversations.
These include, in particular,
- dialog models supporting flexible dialog
(e.g., information state update based,
rather than strict scripting and finite state models),
- modeling the semantics and pragmatics of various types of dialog acts
- modeling various discourse semantic and pragmatic phenomena, such
as anaphoric reference, rhetorical relations, temporal relations,
information structure, presupposition accommodation, etc.
- modeling negotiation and argumentation, subjectivity, opinions and
semantic orientation
- modeling more fine grained aspects of spoken and textual input and
output realization, such as prosody, word order, varied syntactic
structure, discourse markers, etc.
- adaptive multimodalinput and output, fusion and fission.
The goal of the workshop is to survey current work which addresses such
aspects of dialogue modeling, in terms of their effectiveness, coverage
and limitations, as well as ways to combine models addressing
complementary issues. Approaches with a strong empirical grounding are
especially welcome.
Substantial and original submissions on the above topics are welcome.
Accepted papers will be scheduled for
presentation. Since this is a workshop, we encourage papers that describe
speculative ideas, work in progress, and discussions of important issues.
Workshop chairs
Programme Committee
| Nate Blaylock | Saarland University, Germany |
| Eva Hajicova | Charles Univ., Prag, Czech Republic |
| Beth Ann Hockey | NASA Ames Research Center, USA |
| Kristiina Jokinen | Univ. of Helsinki, Finland |
| Oliver Lemon | Univ. of Edinburgh, UK |
| Wolfgang Minker | Univ. of Ulm, Germany |
| Massimo Poesio | Univ. of Essex, UK |
| Norbert Reithinger | DFKI, Germany |
Submissions
Papers describing original work
related to the workshop focus topics above, should be submitted
electronically.
Papers may range from extended abstracts to fully elaborate presentations,
4-8 pages long (inclusive of references, tables, figures and
equations) in PDF format, in accordance with
the guidelines at
KONVENS site.
Authors are strongly encouraged to use the following style file:
colacl.sty
Send your submission to both Helmut Horacek
(horacek@cs.uni-sb.de) and
Ivana Kruijff-Korbayova
(korbay@coli.uni-sb.de).
Important dates
| Paper submissions | 20 July 2004 |
| Notification of acceptance | 4 August 2004 |
| Camera-ready copies due | 20 August 2004 |
| Registration deadline | as KONVENS |
| Workshop dates | 14 September 2004 (afternoon) |
Registration
The registration fees include
attendance of the workshop and a copy of workshop proceedings. Follow the
registration instructions at the
KONVENS site
and indicate that you would like to attend the workshop.
Participation without Submission
People wishing to attend the workshop but not submitting papers should send a
notification of attendance: a 1-2 page stating interest to participate,
work done in NLG so far, and potential contributions / material for
discussions about one of the topics.
This information will help with the organisation of discussions
and allow for an informal and highly interactive workshop.
Contact Information
Notifications of attendance should be sent to
Helmut Horacek (horacek@cs.uni-sb.de)or Ivana Kruijff-Korbayova
(korbay@coli.uni-sb.de).