SIGDIAL 2009 CONFERENCE
10th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group
on Discourse and Dialogue
Queen Mary University of London, UK September 11-12, 2009
(right after Interspeech 2009)
Submission Deadline: April 24, 2009
PRELIMINARY CALL FOR PAPERS
The SIGDIAL venue provides a regular forum for the presentation of
cutting edge research in discourse and dialogue to both academic and
industry researchers. Due to the success of the nine previous SIGDIAL
workshops, SIGDIAL is now a conference. The conference is sponsored by
the SIGDIAL organization, which serves as the Special Interest Group in
discourse and dialogue for both ACL and ISCA. SIGDIAL 2009 will be
co-located with Interspeech 2009 as a satellite event.
In addition to presentations and system demonstrations, the program
includes an invited talk by Professor Janet Bavelas of the University of
Victoria, entitled "What's unique about dialogue?".
TOPICS OF INTEREST
We welcome formal, corpus-based, implementation, experimental, or
analytical work on discourse and dialogue including, but not restricted
to, the following themes:
1. Discourse Processing and Dialogue Systems
Discourse semantic and pragmatic issues in NLP applications such as text
summarization, question answering, information retrieval including
topics like:
- Discourse structure, temporal structure, information structure ;
- Discourse markers, cues and particles and their use;
- (Co-)Reference and anaphora resolution, metonymy and bridging resolution;
- Subjectivity, opinions and semantic orientation;
Spoken, multi-modal, and text/web based dialogue systems including
topics such as:
- Dialogue management models;
- Speech and gesture, text and graphics integration;
- Strategies for preventing, detecting or handling miscommunication
(repair and correction types, clarification and under-specificity,
grounding and feedback strategies);
- Utilizing prosodic information for understanding and for disambiguation;
2. Corpora, Tools and Methodology
Corpus-based and experimental work on discourse and spoken, text-based
and multi-modal dialogue including its support, in particular:
- Annotation tools and coding schemes;
- Data resources for discourse and dialogue studies;
- Corpus-based techniques and analysis (including machine learning);
- Evaluation of systems and components, including methodology, metrics
and case studies;
3. Pragmatic and/or Semantic Modeling
The pragmatics and/or semantics of discourse and dialogue (i.e. beyond a
single sentence) including the following issues:
- The semantics/pragmatics of dialogue acts (including those which are
less studied in the semantics/pragmatics framework);
- Models of discourse/dialogue structure and their relation to
referential and relational structure;
- Prosody in discourse and dialogue;
- Models of presupposition and accommodation; operational models of
conversational implicature.
SUBMISSIONS
The program committee welcomes the submission of long papers for full
plenary presentation as well as short papers and demonstrations. Short
papers and demo descriptions will be featured in short plenary
presentations, followed by posters and demonstrations.
- Long papers must be no longer than 8 pages, including title, examples,
references, etc. In addition to this, two additional pages are allowed
as an appendix which may include extended example discourses or
dialogues, algorithms, graphical representations, etc.
- Short papers and demo descriptions should be 4 pages or less
(including title, examples, references, etc.).
Please use the official ACL style files:
http://ufal.mff.cuni.cz/acl2007/styles/
Papers that have been or will be submitted to other meetings or
publications must provide this information (see submission format).
SIGDIAL 2009 cannot accept for publication or presentation work that
will be (or has been) published elsewhere. Any questions regarding
submissions can be sent to the General Co-Chairs.
Authors are encouraged to make illustrative materials available, on the
web or otherwise. Examples might include excerpts of recorded
conversations, recordings of human-computer dialogues, interfaces to
working systems, and so on.
BEST PAPER AWARDS
In order to recognize significant advancements in dialog and discourse
science and technology, SIGDIAL will (for the first time) recognize a
BEST PAPER AWARD and a BEST STUDENT PAPER AWARD. A selection committee
consisting of prominent researchers in the fields of interest will
select the recipients of the awards.
IMPORTANT DATES (SUBJECT TO CHANGE)
Submission: April 24, 2009
Workshop: September 11-12, 2009
WEBSITES
SIGDIAL 2009 conference website:
http://www.sigdial.org/workshops/workshop10/
SIGDIAL organization website: http://www.sigdial.org/
Interspeech 2009 website: http://www.interspeech2009.org/
ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
For any questions, please contact the appropriate members of the
organizing committee:
GENERAL CO-CHAIRS
Pat Healey (Queen Mary University of London): ph [at] dcs.qmul.ac.uk
Roberto Pieraccini (SpeechCycle): roberto [at] speechcycle.com
TECHNICAL PROGRAM CO-CHAIRS
Donna Byron (Northeastern University): dbyron [at] ccs.neu.edu
Steve Young (University of Cambridge): sjy [at] eng.cam.ac.uk
LOCAL CHAIR
Matt Purver (Queen Mary University of London): mpurver [at] dcs.qmul.ac.uk
SIGDIAL PRESIDENT
Tim Paek (Microsoft Research): timpaek [at] microsoft.com
SIGDIAL VICE PRESIDENT
Amanda Stent (AT&T Labs - Research): amanda.stent [at] gmail.com
TECHNICAL PROGRAM COMMITTEE
Gregory Aist Arizona State University, USA
Jan Alexandersson DFKI GmbH, Germany
Jason Baldridge University of Texas at Austin, USA
Srinivas Bangalore AT&T Labs - Research, USA
Dan Bohus Microsoft Research, USA
Johan Bos Università di Roma "La Sapienza", Italy
Charles Calloway University of Edinburgh, UK
Rolf Carlson Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Sweden
Mark Core University of Southern California, USA
David DeVault University of Southern California, USA
Myroslava Dzikovska University of Edinburgh, UK
Markus Egg Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, Netherlands
Stephanie Elzer Millersville University, USA
Mary Ellen Foster Technical University Munich, Germany
Kallirroi Georgila University of Edinburgh, UK
Jonathan Ginzburg King's College London, UK
Genevieve Gorrell Sheffield University, UK
Alexander Gruenstein Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
Pat Healey Queen Mary University of London, UK
Mattias Heldner Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Sweden
Beth Ann Hockey University of California at Santa Cruz, USA
Kristiina Jokinen University of Helsinki, Finland
Arne Jonsson University of Linköping, Sweden
Simon Keizer University of Cambridge, UK
John Kelleher Dublin Institute of Technology, Ireland
Alexander Koller University of Edinburgh, UK
Ivana Kruijff-Korbayová Universität des Saarlandes, Germany
Staffan Larsson Göteborg University, Sweden
Gary Geunbae Lee Pohang University of Science and Technology,
Korea
Fabrice Lefevre University of Avignon, France
Oliver Lemon University of Edinburgh, UK
James Lester North Carolina State University, USA
Diane Litman University of Pittsburgh, USA
Ramón López-Cózar University of Granada, Spain
François Mairesse University of Cambridge, UK
Michael McTear University of Ulster, UK
Wolfgang Minker University of Ulm, Germany
Sebastian Möller Deutsche Telekom Labs and Technical
University Berlin, Germany
Vincent Ng University of Texas at Dallas, USA
Tim Paek Microsoft Research, USA
Patrick Paroubek LIMSI-CNRS, France
Roberto Pieraccini SpeechCycle, USA
Paul Piwek Open University, UK
Rashmi Prasad University of Pennsylvania, USA
Matt Purver Queen Mary University of London, UK
Laurent Romary INRIA, France
Alex Rudnicky Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Yoshinori Sagisaka Waseda University, Japan
Ruhi Sarikaya IBM Research, USA
Candy Sidner BAE Systems AIT, USA
Ronnie Smith East Carolina University, USA
Amanda Stent AT&T Labs - Research, USA
Matthew Stone Rutgers University, USA
Matthew Stuttle Toshiba Research, UK
Joel Tetreault Educational Testing Service, USA
Jason Williams AT&T Labs - Research, USA