The eighth IJCAI workshop on ``Knowledge and Reasoning in Practical
Dialogue Systems'' will focus on challenges arising due to comprehension
difficulties in dialogue systems. These difficulties include speech
recognition errors and speech disfluencies in spoken dialogue systems,
syntax errors, out-of-grammar and out-of-vocabulary phenomena, rambling
discourse, as well as non-cooperative dialogues. Topics addressed in
the workshop include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Approaches for identifying different types of comprehension
difficulties, ranging from mis-hearing to uncooperative
interlocutors. In particular, how does a dialogue system determine
how well it has understood an utterance?
- Approaches for addressing these difficulties, e.g., correcting likely
hearing problems, learning unknown words, and asking clarification
questions.
- How different types of comprehension difficulties should be addressed
in different parts of a dialogue system, e.g., interpretation,
dialogue strategy, and response generation.
- Robustness when faced with unpredictability and comprehension
difficulties.
- How can we implement dialogue systems that take into consideration
their environment? What is the role of the environment in addressing
comprehension difficulties?
- What are the most appropriate ways to evaluate dialogue systems for
different applications and situations? In particular, how does one
evaluate robustness when faced with comprehension difficulties?
This is the eighth IJCAI workshop on ``Knowledge and Reasoning in Practical
Dialogue Systems''. The first workshop was held at IJCAI in Stockholm
in 1999. The second workshop was held at IJCAI 2001 in Seattle, with a
focus on multimodal interfaces. The Third workshop was held in Acapulco,
in 2003, and focused on the role and use of ontologies in multi-modal
dialogue systems. The fourth workshop was held in Edinburgh in 2005,
and focused on adaptivity in dialogue systems. The fifth workshop, which
focused on dialogue systems for robots and virtual humans, was
held in Hyderabad, India, in 2007. The focus of the sixth workshop, held
in Pasadena, CA in 2009, was on challenges of novel applications of
practical dialogue systems, and the seventh workshop, held in Barcelona,
Spain, in 2011, considered dialogue systems for different types of users,
such as elderly people and people with special needs.
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Who should attend
This workshop aims to bring together researchers and practitioners who
work on the development of communication models that support robust and
efficient interaction in natural language, both in basic research and in
commercial dialogue systems. The topic is timely, as dialogue systems,
in particular spoken ones, are ready to progress from toy or restricted
domains to more open-ended applications. As the applications become
more complex, so does the potential for comprehension difficulties,
which must be robustly handled.
The workshop should also be of interest to anyone studying dialogue
and multimodal interfaces. The proposed workshop emphasizes practical
research, e.g., empirical evaluations, formalization of dialogue
phenomena, and development of intelligent interfaces for various
applications.
As with the previous workshops in the series, we expect to benefit from
informal, high quality interactions between those interested and involved
in developing practical dialogue systems, including sharing of techniques
and experiences. Additionally, the theme of comprehension difficulties
is expected to attract participation from industry, as this is a common
problem in dialogue systems ranging from triage and slot-filling systems
to virtual reality systems. It is worth noting that while there has been
a fair amount of recent work in (spoken) dialogue systems, to the best
of our knowledge, there has not been a recent workshop that focuses on
comprehension difficulties.
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Workshop format
The workshop will be kept small, as a one day workshop 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. We will also encourage contributions of a critical
or comparative nature that provide fuel for discussion, and will invite people
to share their experiences of implementing and coordinating knowledge
modules in their dialogue systems, and integrating dialogue components
with other applications. Further, we hope to have contributions which
focus on the challenges of Chinese dialogue systems.
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Important Dates
* Submission of contributions to workshop: April 20, 2013
* Notification of acceptance: May 20, 2013
* Deadline for final camera ready copy May 30, 2013
* Workshop date: August 3 or 4, 2013
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Submission Instructions
Potential participants are invited to submit papers on the topics
outlined above. Submissions may be of the following types:
* Regular Papers papers of length 6-12 pages, for regular presentation
* Short Papers with brief results, or position papers, of length up to 6.
Papers should include authors names and affiliation and full references (not
anonymous submission). All papers should be formatted according to the
AAAI format: http://www.aaai.org/Publications/Author/author.php
Papers should be submitted by web by registering at the following
address:
http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=krpd2013
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Organizing Committee
Ingrid Zukerman (Chair)
Faculty of Information Technology
Monash University
Clayton, Victoria 3800, Australia
tel: +61 3 9905-5202
fax: +61 3 9905-5159
email: Ingrid.Zukerman [at] monash.edu
Jan Alexandersson (Co-Chair)
German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, DFKI GmbH
Stuhlsatzenhausweg 3
D-66 123 Saarbruecken, Germany
tel: +49-681-85775 5347
fax: +49-681-85775 5341
email: janal [at] dfki.de
Arne Jonsson (Co-Chair)
Department of Computer and Information Science
Linkoping University
S-581 83 Linkoping, Sweden
tel: +46 13 281717
fax: +46 13 142231
email: arnjo [at] ida.liu.se
David Traum (Co-Chair)
Institute for Creative Technologies
University of Southern California
12015 Waterfront Drive
Playa Vista, CA 90094, USA
tel: +1 (310) 574-5729
fax: +1 (310) 574-5725
email: traum [at] ict.usc.edu
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Programme committee
Dan Bohus, Microsoft Research, USA
Sandra Carberry, University of Delaware, USA
Lawrence Cavedon, NICTA and RMIT, Australia
Jens Edlund, Royal Technical Institute (KTH), Sweden
Maxine Eskenazi, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Alex Chengyu Fang, The City University of Hong Kong, China
Kallirroi Georgila, University of Southern California, USA
Thomas Kleinbauer, Monash University, Australia
Kazunori Komatani, Nagoya University, Japan
Diane Litman, University of Pittsburgh, USA
Kathleen McCoy, University of Delaware, USA
Helen Meng, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, China
Wolfgang Minker, Universitat Ulm, Germany
Mikio Nakano, Honda Research Institute, Japan
Rebecca Passonneau, Columbia University, USA
Olivier Pietquin, Supelec, France
Norbert Reithinger, DFKI, Germany
Candace Sidner, Sidner Consulting, USA
Gabriel Skanze, Royal Technical Institute (KTH), Sweden
Jason Williams, Microsoft Research, USA