SIGDIAL 2007
8th SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue
Antwerp, September 2-3, 2007 (Immediately following Interspeech 2007)

** New Submission Deadline: May 11, 2007 **
 

CALL FOR PAPERS
Continuing with a series of successful workshops in Sydney, Lisbon, Boston, Sapporo, Philadelphia, Aalborg, and Hong Kong, this workshop spans the ACL and ISCA SIGdial interest area of discourse and dialogue. This series provides a regular forum for the presentation of research in this area to both the larger SIGdial community as well as researchers outside this community. The workshop is organized by SIGdial, which is sponsored jointly by ACL and ISCA. SIGdial 2007 will be co-located with Interspeech 2007 as a satellite workshop.

TOPICS OF INTEREST

We welcome formal, corpus-based, implementation or analytical work on discourse and dialogue including but not restricted to the following three 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 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 aim to be 4 pages or less (including title, examples, references, etc.).

Please use the official ACL style files: http://ufal.mff.cuni.cz/acl2007/styles/. Note that unlike ACL submissions, reviewing will not be blind. Submission/Reviewing will be managed by the START system: http://www.softconf.com/acl07/SIGDIAL07/

Papers that have been or will be submitted to other meetings or publications must provide this information (see submission format). SIGdial 2007 cannot accept for publication or presentation work that will be (or has been) published elsewhere. Any questions regarding submissions can be sent to the co-Chairs.

Authors are encouraged to make illustrative materials available, on the web or otherwise. For example, excerpts of recorded conversations, recordings of human-computer dialogues, interfaces to working systems, etc.

IMPORTANT DATES
Submission May 11, 2007
Notification June 13, 2007
Final submissions July 6, 2007
Workshop September 2-3, 2007

WEBSITES
Workshop website: http://www.sigdial.org/workshops/workshop8
Submission link: http://www.softconf.com/acl07/SIGDIAL07/
SIGdial organization website: http://www.sigdial.org
Interspeech 2007 website: http://www.interspeech2007.org

CONTACT
For any questions, please contact the Co-Chairs at: timpaek[at]microsoft[dot]com or harry[dot]bunt[at]uvt[dot]nl

PROGRAM COMMITTEE (CONFIRMED)
Harry Bunt, Tilburg University, Netherlands (co-chair)
Tim Paek, Microsoft Research, USA (co-chair)
Simon Keizer, Tilburg University, Netherlands (local chair)

Arne Jönsson, Linköping University, Sweden
Alex Rudnicky, CMU, USA
Andrei Popescu-Belis, University of Geneva, Switzerland
Bonnie Webber, University of Edinburgh, UK
Candy Sidner, Bae Systems, USA
Claudia Soria, CNR, Italy
Dan Bohus, CMU, USA
David Traum, USC/ICT, USA
Emiel Krahmer, Tilburg University, Netherlands
Gokhan Tur, SRI, USA
Ingrid Zuckerman, Monash University, Australia
Jan Alexandersson, DFKI GmbH, Germany
Jason Williams, AT&T Labs, USA
Jean Carletta, University of Endignburgh, UK
Jens Allwood, University of Göteborg, Sweden
Julia Hirchberg, Columbia University, USA
Justine Cassell, Northwestern University, USA
Kallirroi Georgila, University of Edinburgh, UK
Kristiina Jokinen, University of Helsinki, Finland
Laila Dybkjær, University of Southern Denmark, Denmark
Marc Swerts, Tilburg University, Netherlands
Marilyn Walker, Sheffield University, UK
Mark Core, USC/ICT, USA
Masato Ishizaki, University of Tokyo, Japan
Massimo Poesio, University of Essex, UK
Matthew Stone, Rutgers University, USA
Michael Johnston, AT&T Labs, USA
Michael McTear, University of Ulster, UK
Oliver Lemon, University of Edinburgh, UK
Patrick Paroubek, LIMSI-CNRS, France
Paul Piwek, Open University, UK
Robbert-Jan Beun, Universiteit Utrecht, Netherlands
Roberto Pieraccini, Speech Cycle, USA
Rolf Carlson, KTH, Sweden
Sadaoki Furui, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan
Srinivas Bangalore, AT&T Labs, USA
Stephanie Seneff, MIT, USA
Steve Young, Cambridge University, UK
Wolfgang Minker, University of Ulm, Germany
 

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 IEEE ICSC2007
First IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing
September 17-19, 2007
Irvine, California, USA
http://ICSC2007.eecs.uci.edu/

** New Submission Deadline: May 18, 2007 **

Sponsored by IEEE Computer Society in cooperation with University of California at Irvine

The IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing (ICSC2007) is an international forum for researchers to exchange information regarding advancements in the state of the art and practice of semantic computing, as well as to identify the emerging research topics and define the future of semantic computing. The technical program of ICSC2007 will consist of invited talks, paper presentations, and panel discussions.

Submissions of high quality papers describing mature results or on-going work are invited. Topics for submission include but are not limited to:

• Natural language understanding and processing

• Understanding and processing of texts and multimedia contents

• Content-based retrieval of texts, images, videos and audios

• Speech recognition

• Semantic web search

• Semantic web services

• Semantic annotation of multimedia contents

• Natural language driven computing

• Multimedia driven computing

• Question answering

• Spoken dialogue and multi-modal systems

• Data, knowledge and software engineering issues

• Integration of semantic systems

• Semantic computing and wireless communications

• Content-based security

• Semantic Computing in the areas of Identity and Privacy Management

• Semantic infrastructure

• Context-aware architecture for networks of sensors, devices, applications and resources

• Semantic social networks

• Sensor intelligent computing/networks

• Ubiquitous and trustworthy computing

• Semantic communication

• Applications of semantic computing

• Hardware support for semantic computing

Submissions
Authors should submit an 8-page technical paper manuscript in double-column IEEE format following the submission guidelines available on the ICSC2007 web page. The Conference Proceedings will be published by the IEEE Computer Society Press and all papers are indexed. About 10 papers presented at the conference will be selected for publications in International Journals of Semantic Computing.

There will be a Best Paper Award and a Best Student Paper Award for the best submitted paper and the best submitted student paper. The award winners will be announced at the conference banquet.

Deadlines:
05/01/2007 Submission of workshop, panel and special session proposals
05/18/2007 Submission of papers - extended deadline
07/01/2007 Notification of acceptance of proposals and papers
07/15/2007 Camera-Ready copy of accepted papers

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CALL FOR PAPERS
IEEE SIGNAL PROCESSING MAGAZINE
Special Issue on Spoken Language Technology

The evolution of speech and language technologies over the past decade has spawned an exciting new research area known as Spoken Language Technology (SLT). Technological advances in SLT promise to provide ubiquitous and personalized access to information, communication, and entertainment services. For example, advances in natural language understanding and large vocabulary continuous speech recognition have resulted in a new generation of automated contact center services that offer callers the flexibility to speak their request naturally using their own words as opposed to the words dictated to them by the machine. Advances in machine translation technology have resulted in speech-to-speech translation products that offer multi-party multi-lingual communication. Advances in information search and data mining are providing the means to extract intelligence information from large corpora of speech data (e.g., TV programs, call center data) to help improve business operation and search for information rapidly without having to listen to conversations.

This special issue on Spoken Language Technology is motivated by the first SLT workshop, Aruba, December 2006, jointly sponsored by IEEE and ACL (www.slt2006.org). The goal is to solicit tutorial articles with comprehensive surveys of important theories, algorithms, tools, and applications of SLT on existing and new commercial, academic and government applications. Prospective authors should submit a white paper summarizing the motivation, the significance of the topic, brief history, and an outline of the content. Authors with accepted proposals will be invited to write a full manuscript.

Scope of topics:

Publications in the following areas are strongly encouraged

• Spoken language understanding
• Dialog management
• Spoken language generation
• Spoken document retrieval
• Information extraction from speech
• Question answering from speech
• Spoken document summarization
• Machine translation of spoken language
• Speech data mining and search

• Voice-based human computer interfaces
• Spoken dialog systems, applications and standards         
• Multimodal processing, systems and standards
• Machine learning for spoken language processing
• Speech and language processing in the world wide web

Submission Procedure:
Prospective authors should submit their white papers to the web submission system at http://www.cspl.umd.edu/spm/, according to the following timetable. The white papers will be limited to 2-3 single-sided and double-spaced pages.

White paper due: June 1, 2007
Invitation notification: July 1, 2007
Manuscript due: October 1, 2007
Acceptance Notification: December 1, 2007
Final Manuscript due: February 1, 2008
Publication date: May, 2008.
 

Guest Editors:

Steve Young
Cambridge University
Trumpington Street
Cambridge, CB2 1PZ
sjy@eng.cam.ac.uk

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Special Issue of the IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing

on New Approaches to Statistical Speech and Text Processing

Dramatic advances in automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology in recent years has enabled serious growth in spoken language processing research, both for human-computer interaction and spoken document processing.  The challenges of working with spoken language, including ASR errors and disfluencies, were major factors in the adoption of statistical techniques in the language processing community. Statistical methods now dominate many areas of text processing as well, enabled by growing collections of linguistic data resources and developments in machine learning. While transfer of methods from spoken- to written-language processing continues, advances in written-language processing also now have a significant impact on spoken-language processing. This issue seeks to highlight the cross-fertilization in speech and text processing by publishing novel statistical modeling and learning methods that span a variety of language processing applications.

We invite papers describing new approaches to statistical language processing of both spoken and written language. Submissions must not have been previously published, with the exception that substantial extensions of conference papers will be considered. Of particular interest are methods that transfer recent developments from text processing to speech processing and vice versa, but new methods in one domain are also welcome. Papers describing new strategies for integrating acoustic and linguistic cues in spoken language processing are also encouraged. Topics of interest include:  

• Unsupervised and semi-supervised learning
• Discriminative learning
• Transfer or adaptation to new domains
• Active learning
• Reinforcement learning
• Memory-based learning and neighborhood methods
• Novel statistical models
• Statistical methods for feature selection or transformation

Specific applications of interest include information extraction, question answering, text segmentation and classification, summarization, translation, language generation and spoken language dialogs.  Papers that address component problems of these larger applications are also encouraged, including parsing, discourse analysis, and talker interaction analysis. The issue aims to cover a variety of applications as well as different statistical methods.

Submission procedure:

Prospective authors should prepare manuscripts according to the Information for Authors as published in any recent issue of the Transactions and as available on the web at http://www.ieee.org/organizations/society/sp/infotsa.html. Note that all rules will apply with regard to submission lengths, mandatory overlength page charges, and color charges. Manuscripts should be submitted electronically through the online IEEE manuscript submission system at http://sps-ieee.manuscriptcentral.com/. When selecting a manuscript type, authors must click on "Special Issue of TASLP on New Approaches to Statistical Speech and Text Processing". Authors should follow the instructions for the IEEE Transactions Audio, Speech and Language Processing and indicate in the Comments to the Editor-in-Chief that the manuscript is submitted for publication in the Special Issue on New Approaches to Statistical Speech and Text Processing. We require a completed copyright form to be signed and faxed to +1-732-562-8905 at the time of submission. Please indicate the manuscript number on the top of the page.

Schedule:

Guest Editors:

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