Call for Papers:
May 4, 2000
Seattle, Washington
Contents
The purpose of this workshop is to focus the discourse and dialogue
community on best practices as well as theory of conversational
systems, both speech based and text based. The workshop will also
bring together creators of working conversational systems to discuss their
efforts, both successes and limitations.
In this workshop we encourage papers on either theoretical or applied
research with a focus on results in working systems. We also welcome
papers on working systems that provide a critical appraisal of their
capabilities as well as their limitations; we encourage such papers to
provide the criteria of critique that the authors feel are most
relevant to their work. This workshop will consider in particular:
- How can systems be designed so that it is easier to build
applications in new domains?
- What significant features of dialogue are beyond current working
systems? What proposals show the most promise for capturing these
features?
- What knowledge does a system need to represent about a domain, tasks
and discourse to support intelligent conversational interaction?
- What can be learned from data and what should be learned from data?
Can robust systems be built for domains where there is not a large amount
of data available?
- What is the role of natural language generation in conversational systems?
- What aspects of discourse prosody are now feasible in conversational systems?
- What aspects of nonverbal behavior are now feasible -- and worthwhile
implementing -- in conversational systems?
- How can the real-world performance of conversational systems be measured and anticipated? How can the performance of different systems be compared?
In addition to the presentation of papers and the discussions that
will result from them, we plan demonstration sessions and a panel
session. The demonstration sessions will be open to anyone who wishes
to bring their conversational systems for demonstration to other
members of the workshop. Presenters are asked to submit a paper that
is specifically directed at a demonstration of their current systems.
These papers should cover the following topics as well as others the
presenters think are relevant:
- a short system description,
- an example dialogue or dialogues, as space permits,
- discussion of the most important contribution of the work,
- discussion of the most significant limitation of the work.
These papers will be included in the workshop proceedings.
In the panel session we plan to bring together a set of experts to
compare various approaches (including frame-based, finite-state,
plan-based and statistical and logical reasoning-based) to dialogue in
working conversational systems.
A website which will provide additional information on the workshop as
it becomes available is located at: http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/traum/ConvSys/.
| Paper submission deadline: | February 4 |
| Notification of acceptance for papers: | March 1 |
| Camera ready papers due: | March 13 |
| Workshop date: | May 4 |
FORMAT FOR SUBMISSION
Submissions must use the ACL latex style or ACL Microsoft Word style,
both of which can be found at
http://www.gte.com/AboutGTE/gto/anlp-naacl2000/cfp_submission.html. Paper
submissions should consist of a full paper of 8 pages (including
references). Please send submission questions to Alex
air@cs.cmu.edu, before, not after, January 31, 2000.
Submission Procedure:
Electronic submission only: send the pdf (preferred), postscript or
MS Word form of your submission to: Alex Rudnicky, air@cs.cmu.edu,. The
Subject line should be "ANLP-NAACL2000 WORKSHOP PAPER
SUBMISSION". Because reviewing is blind, no author information is
included as part of the paper. An identification page must be sent in
a separate email with the subject line: "ANLP-NAACL2000 WORKSHOP ID
PAGE" and must include title, all authors, theme area, keywords, word
count, and an abstract of no more than 5 lines. Late submissions will
not be accepted. Notification of receipt will be e-mailed to the first
author shortly after receipt.
Organizing Committee
| Candy Sidner | MERL (Chair) |
| James Allen | Univ. of Rochester |
| Harald Aust | Philips Corp. |
| Phil Cohen | Oregon Graduate Institute |
| Justine Cassell | Media Lab, MIT |
| Laila Dybkjaer | University of Southern Denmark |
| X.D. Huang | Microsoft |
| Masato Ishizaki | Japan Adv. Institute of Science and Technology |
| Candace Kamm | AT&T |
| Lin-Shan Lee | Taiwan University |
| Susann Luperfoy | Akamai Technologies |
| Patti Price | SRI International |
| Owen Rambow | AT&T |
| Norbert Reithinger | DFKI Saarbruecken |
| Alex Rudnicky | Carnegie Mellon University |
| Stephanie Seneff | MIT |
| Dave Stallard | BBN/GTE |
| David Traum | University of Maryland |
| Marilyn Walker | AT&T |
| Wayne Ward | Univ of Colorado, Boulder |
For More Information
Please direct questions as follows: