schedule

proceedings

Description of the Workshop

The fifth workshop on Knowledge and Reasoning in Practical Dialogue Systems will focus on dialogue systems for Robots or Virtual Humans. We encourage submission of papers presenting successful adaptive dialogue systems as well as papers on potential drawbacks (or challenges).

Topics addressed in the workshop include, but are not limited to the following, especially in the context of dialogue systems for robots or virtual humans:

• Methods for design and development of dialogue systems.
• What are the extra constraints and resources of a dialogue system for robots and virtual humans, that might not be present in a speech or text only dialogue system or even traditional multi-modal interface?
• Dialogue management strategies for non-verbal behavior.
• Representation of language resources for dialogue systems.
• The role of ontologies in dialogue systems for robots and virtual humans.
• Understanding and generation of spatial language using visual representations.
• Evaluation of dialogue systems, what to evaluate and how.
• Techniques and algorithms for adaptivity in dialogue systems on various levels, e.g. interpretation, dialogue strategy, and generation.
• Robustness and how to handle unpredictability.
• Architectures and frameworks for adaptive dialogue systems. Requirements and methods for development related to the architecture.

This is the fifth workshop on Knowledge and Reasoning in Practical Dialogue Systems. The first workshop was organised at IJCAI-99 in Stockholm, the second workshop took place at IJCAI-2001 in Seattle, and the third workshop was held at IJCAI-2003 in Acapulco. The the fourth workshop was held at IJCAI-2005 at Edinburgh.

Who should attend

This workshop aims at bringing together researchers and practitioners that work on the development of communication models that support robust and efficient interaction in natural language, both for commercial dialogue systems and in basic research.

It should be of interest also for anyone studying dialogue and multimodal interfaces and how to coordinate different information sources. This involves theoretical as well as practical research, e.g. empirical evaluations of usability, formalization of dialogue phenomena and development of intelligent interfaces for various applications, especially Robotics and virtual reality.

The workshop will encourage the participation of both system builders and theoretically oriented researchers, thus creating a forum for discussion across vocational and disciplinary borders. While taking practical applications and implemented dialogue systems as our point of departure, we emphasize the potential contributions of theoretical and empirical research: applications are the best testbeds for evaluating the usefulness and originality of theories and ideas.

Workshop format

The workshop will be kept small, with a maximum of 40 participants. Preference will be given to active participants selected on the basis of their submitted papers.

Each paper will be given ample time for discussion, more than what is customary at a conference. As said above, we encourage contributions of a critical or comparative nature that provide fuel for discussion. We also invite people to share their experiences of implementing and coordinating knowledge modules in their dialogue systems, and integrating dialogue components to other applications.

Important Dates

Submissions

• Regular Papers papers of length 4-8 pages, for regular presentation
• Short Papers with brief results, or position papers, of length up to 4 pages for brief or panel presentation.
• Extended papers with extra details on system architecture, background theory or data presentation, of up to 12 pages, for regular presentation.

• Formatting guidelines in PDF format (ijcai07_format.pdf)
  
• Formatting guidelines as Word template (ijcai07_format.dot)
  
• Formatting guidelines as LaTeX sources (ijcai07_format_latex.tar)
  
• Guidelines for Generating PDF Files

Organizing Committee

Jan Alexandersson (Co-Chair)
German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, DFKI GmbH
Stuhlsatzenhausweg 3
D-66 123 Saarbrücken
Germany
tel: +49-681-3025347
fax: +49-681-3025341
email: jan.alexandersson@dfki.de

Arne Jönsson (Co-Chair)
Department of Computer and Information Science
Linköping University
S-581 83 Linköping, Sweden
tel: +46 13 281717
fax: +46 13 142231
email: arnjo@ida.liu.se

Ingrid Zukerman (Co-Chair)
School of Computer Science and Software Engineering
Monash University
Clayton, Victoria 3800, Australia
tel: +61 3 9905-5202
fax: +61 3 9905-5146
email: ingrid@csse.monash.edu.au

Program Committee