CALL FOR PAPERS

http://www.sigdial.org/workshops/conference12/

SIGDIAL 2011 CONFERENCE:   12th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest
Group on Discourse and Dialogue
June 17-18, 2011, Oregon Health & Science University in Portland Oregon
(Immediately preceding ACL-HLT 2011)

The  SIGDIAL venue provides  a regular forum  for  the presentation of
cutting edge research  in discourse and  dialogue to both academic and
industry  researchers.  Continuing with  a series of successful eleven
previous meetings, this conference spans the research interest area of
discourse and dialogue.  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  2011 will be co-located
with ACL-HLT 2011 as a satellite event.


TOPICS OF INTEREST

We welcome formal, corpus-based, implementation  or analytical work on
discourse and  dialogue including but not  restricted to the following
themes and topics:

1. Discourse Processing and Dialogue Systems

Discourse semantic  and pragmatic issues  in NLP  applications such as
text summarization,  question   answering, or 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
* Coordination of speech, gesture, and eye gaze
* Text and graphics integration
* Strategies for preventing, detecting or handling miscommunication
* Utilizing prosodic information for understanding and for disambiguation
* Embodied conversational agents

2. Corpora, Tools and Methodology

Corpus-based  work on discourse  and spoken, text-based or 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: 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);
* Models of discourse/dialogue structure +/- referential and relational
   structure;
* Prosody in discourse and dialogue;
* Models of presupposition, accommodation, or conversational implicature.
* Grounded semantics in situated dialogue

4. Dimensions of Interaction

Methods to address how interaction is shaped by specific properties of
users, goals, modalities
* Turn taking within or across modalities
* User modeling
* Models of adaptation, such as entrainment
* Comparison of interactions of distinct types (e.g., task-based versus
   tutorial)
* Multiparty interaction

5. Applications

The applications of dialogue and discourse processing technology in:
* Training and education/tutoring systems
* Entertainment and gaming applications
* Online chatting, blog, and social network analysis
* Human robot interaction

SPECIAL THEME

There has been   an increasing amount  of  work in   enabling situated
dialogue in both  the virtual world (e.g.,  human agent dialogue in  a
game  environment)  and the physical  environment  (e.g.,  human robot
dialogue). For  example, the GIVE  Initiative  has provided benchmarks
and  evaluations    for instruction     generation   in  3D    virtual
environments. More recently, the AAAI 2010  Fall Symposium on Dialogue
with Robots brought together   researchers from different  disciplines
who  brainstormed challenges and  future  directions in situated human
robot  dialogue.  To  continue  the  momentum  and   encourage broader
participation  in SIGDIAL, this  year we will  have a special theme on
'situated dialogue'.  We invite submissions that address any aspect of
this special topic.

SUBMISSIONS

The program  committee welcomes the submission  of long  papers, short
papers, and   demo  descriptions. All   accepted submissions  will  be
published in the conference' proceedings.

* Long papers  will be presented  in full plenary  presentations. They
   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 will  be featured in  a short paper spotlight  session,
   followed   by posters. They   should be 4   pages or less (including
   title, examples, references, etc.).

* This year's demonstrations  will be presented  in a special session,
   separated from  short paper presentations  and poster sessions. Demo
   descriptions will appear  in a dedicated  section of the proceedings
   and   should  be 3   pages   or  less   (including title,  examples,
   references,  etc.).   To   encourage  late  breaking    demos,  demo
   submissions have a  much later deadline compared  to long and  short
   papers.

Papers that  have  been or  will  be submitted  to other  meetings  or
publications  must    provide    this information    (see   submission
format).  SIGDIAL 2011 cannot accept  for  publication or presentation
work that will  be  (or has   been)  published elsewhere,  except  for
demonstrations. Any questions regarding submissions can be sent to the
technical program co-chairs at program-chairs[at]sigdial.org.

Authors are  encouraged to submit  additional supportive material such
as video clips or sound clips and examples  of available resources for
the review purposes.

Submission  is  electronic    using  paper  submission  software   at:
https://www.softconf.com/b/sigdial2011/


FORMAT

All long,  short,  and demo  submissions should  follow the two-column
ACL-HLT 2011format. We strongly  recommend the use  of ACL LaTeX style
files  or Microsoft   Word style  files   tailored  for  ACL-HLT  2011
conference. Submissions  must  conform to  the  official  ACL-HLT 2011
style  guidelines, which are  contained in the  style  files, and they
must be electronic  in PDF.  As  in  most previous years,  submissions
will not be anonymous.

ACL-HLT 2011 Style Files

Latex:
latex.zip -
http://www.sigdial.org/workshops/conference12/ACLstyles/latex.zip
acl-hlt2011.tex -
http://www.sigdial.org/workshops/conference12/ACLstyles/latex/acl-hlt2011.tex
acl-hlt2011.sty -
http://www.sigdial.org/workshops/conference12/ACLstyles/latex/acl-hlt2011.sty
acl-hlt2011.pdf -
http://www.sigdial.org/workshops/conference12/ACLstyles/latex/acl-hlt2011.pdf
acl.bst -
http://www.sigdial.org/workshops/conference12/ACLstyles/latex/acl.bst

MS Word:
word.zip - http://www.sigdial.org/workshops/conference12/ACLstyles/word.zip
acl-hlt2011.doc -
http://www.sigdial.org/workshops/conference12/ACLstyles/word/acl-hlt2011.doc
acl-hlt2011.dot -
http://www.sigdial.org/workshops/conference12/ACLstyles/word/acl-hlt2011.dot
acl-hlt2011.pdf -
http://www.sigdial.org/workshops/conference12/ACLstyles/word/acl-hlt2011.pdf

IMPORTANT DATES

Long/Short Paper Submission Deadline:  February 25, 23:59, GMT-11, 2011
Long/Short Paper Notification:  April 15, 2011
Demo Submission Deadline:  April 19, 2011
Demo Notification:  April 26, 2011
Final Paper Submission (all types):  May 15, 2011
Conference:  June 17-18, 2011

MENTORING SERVICE

The mentoring service offered  last year has  been very beneficial. We
will follow the same practice this  year.  Submissions with innovative
core    ideas that  may  need   language  (English)  or organizational
assistance will be flagged for  'mentoring' and conditionally accepted
with recommendation to revise with a mentor. An experienced mentor who
has previously published   in the SIGDIAL   venue will then  help  the
authors  of   these  flagged papers    prepare their  submissions  for
publication. Any    questions about  the   mentoring  service  can  be
addressed  to   the   mentoring service    chair:   Dr. Ronnie   Smith
(mentoring[at]sigdial.org).

BEST PAPER AWARDS

In order to recognize significant advancements in dialog and discourse
science and technology, SIGDIAL will 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.


ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

For any  questions, please  contact the   appropriate  members of  the
organizing committee:

General  Co-Chairs (conference[at]sigdial.org):
   Johanna Moore, The University of Edinburgh, UK;
   David Traum,  University  of Southern California, USA
Technical Program Co-Chairs (program-chairs[at]sigdial.org,
conference[at]sigdial.org):
   Joyce Chai, Michigan  State  University, USA;
   Rebecca J. Passonneau, Columbia University, USA
Program Committee: TBA
Mentoring Chair (mentoring[at]sigdial.org):
   Ronnie Smith, East Carolina University, USA
Local Chair: Peter Heeman Oregon Health & Science University, USA
Sponsorships Chair (conference[at]sigdial.org):
   Jason Williams,  AT&T Labs - Research, USA
SIGDIAL President: Tim Paek, Microsoft Research, USA
SIGDIAL Vice President: Amanda Stent, AT&T Labs - Research, USA
SIGDIAL Secretary/Treasurer: Kristiina Jokinen, University of Helsinki,
Finland

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Call for Participation

 Symposium on Machine Learning in Speech and Language Processing

June 27, 2011

Bellevue, Washington, USA

http://www.ttic.edu/sigml/symposium2011/

The symposium will be held in Bellevue, Washington on June 27^th, 2011. It will bring together members of the Association for Computational Linguistics ( http://www.aclweb.org/ ), the International Speech Communication Association (http://www.isca-speech.org/), and The International Machine Learning Society (http://www.machinelearning.org/) .  Its goal is to foster communication and collaboration between researchers in these synergistic areas, taking advantage of the nearby locations of ACL-HLT 2011 and ICML 2011.

Topics

The workshop will feature a series of invited talks and general submissions. Submissions focusing on novel research are solicited and we especially encourage position and review papers addressing topics that are relevant both to Speech, Machine Learning and NLP. These areas include but are not limited to the use of: SVMs, log-linear models, neural networks, kernel methods, discriminative transforms, large margin training, discriminative training, active, semi-supervised & unsupervised training, structured prediction, Bayesian modeling, deep learning , and sparse representations. Application areas include natural language processing, speech recognition, language modeling, and speaker verification.

Paper Submission

Prospective authors are invited to submit papers written in English via the symposium website. Style guidelines and further submission information will be available from the website. Each paper will be reviewed by at least two reviewers, and each accepted paper must have at least one registered author.

Important Dates

• April 15 - Papers due
• May 6 - Notification of acceptance
• May 27 – Deadline for early registration
• June 27 - Workshop

Venue, Accommodation and Registration

Venue: SIG-ML will be held at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Bellevue, Washington, the site of ICML.

Accommodation:  A wide variety of lodging is available in the Bellevue area.

Registration: Please see the website for details.

Organizing Committee

Hal Daume III, University of Maryland; Joseph Keshet, TTI-Chicago;

 Dan Roth, UIUC; Geoffrey Zweig, Microsoft 

Scientific Program Committee

Jeff Bilmes, University of Washington; Brian Kingsbury, IBM; Karen Livescu, TTI-Chicago

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CALL FOR PAPERS

We would like to invite you to submit a paper to the SLaTE-2011 workshop
August 24-26, 2011 (before Interspeech-2011 in Florence, Italy)
Ca' Foscari University, Venice, Italy
http://project.cgm.unive.it/events/SLaTE2011/

ISCA-SIG SLaTE
The ISCA (International Speech Communication Association) Special Interest Group (SIG) on Speech and Language Technology in Education (SLaTE) promotes the use of speech and language technology for educational purposes, and provides a forum for exchanging information (http://www.sigslate.org).

WORKSHOP THEMES
The workshop will address all topics related to SLaTE, such as:
- Speech technology for education
- Natural language processing for education
- Spoken dialogue systems for education
- Applications using speech and/or natural language processing for education
- Intelligent tutoring systems using speech and natural language
- Development of language resources for SLaTE applications
- Assessment of SLaTE methods and applications

We especially welcome contributions on the future of Speech and Language Technology in Education, e.g. mobile learning, serious gaming, virtual reality, social media (networks), etc.
In addition, we would like to invite demonstrations of systems.

PAPER SUBMISSION
Full 4-page papers should be submitted before April 8, 2011.
Notification of acceptance or rejection of papers will be given by June 10, 2011.
For further information see http://project.cgm.unive.it/events/SLaTE2011/
If you have questions, you can send an e-mail to SLaTE2011-org (at) let.ru.nl

ORGANIZATION
SLaTE-2011 will be organized by Helmer Strik, Catia Cucchiarini (Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands, technical program), Rodolfo Delmonte and Rocco Tripodi (Ca' Foscari University, Venice, Italy, local organizers), within the framework of the ISCA-SIG SLaTE (see http://www.sigslate.org).

Best regards,
Helmer Strik, Catia Cucchiarini, Rodolfo Delmonte, and Rocco Tripodi
The SLaTE-2011 Organizing Committee

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