FW: Austria: Advanced Topics in Modelling Natural Language Dialog (Workshop at KONVENS 2004) CFP

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                          Call for Papers
 
 
          ADVANCED TOPICS IN MODELING NATURAL LANGUAGE DIALOG
                    (Workshop at KONVENS 2004)
 
                         14 September 2004
                          Vienna, Austria
 
          http://www.ags.uni-sb.de/~horacek/KONVENS04-WS.html
 
 
 
 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
 
 Helmut Horacek, Saarland University
 Ivana Kruijff-Korbayov=E0, Saarland University
 
 Programme Committee (to be announced)
 
 
 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 the KONVENS site
 (http://www.oefai.at/konvens2004).
 Authors are strongly encouraged to use the following style file:
 http://www.oefai.at/konvens2004/KONVENS-2004_files/colacl.sty.
 
 Send your submission to Helmut Horacek (horacek@cs.uni-sb.de) or 
 Ivana Kruijff-Korbayov=E0 (korbay@coli.uni-sb.de)</a>.
 
 Important date
 
 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
 (http://www.oefai.at/konvens2004) 
 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-Korbayov=E0 (korbay@coli.uni-sb.de).

Received on Thursday, 17 June 2004 15:34:21 UTC