SemDial 2011 (Los Angelogue)

The 15th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue

Los Angeles, September 21-23, 2011

http://projects.ict.usc.edu/nld/semdial2011

The SemDial series of workshops aims to bring together researchers working on the semantics and pragmatics of dialogue in fields such as artificial intelligence, computational linguistics, formal semantics/pragmatics, philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience. In 2011 the workshop will leave Europe for the first time, to be held at the Institute for Creative Technologies of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. The SemDial workshops are always stimulating and fun, and L.A. is a great place to visit.

Invited Speakers:

Jerry Hobbs

David Schlangen

Additional invited speakers to be announced later

Call for Papers:

Submission is now open.

We invite papers on all topics related to the semantics and pragmatics of dialogues, including, but not limited to:

- Models of common ground/mutual belief in communication

- Modelling agents' information states and how they get updated

- Multi-agent models and turn-taking

- Goals, intentions and commitments in communication

- Semantic interpretation in dialogues

- Reference in dialogues

- Ellipsis resolution in dialogues

- Dialogue and discourse structure

- Interpretation of questions and answers

- Nonlinguistic interaction in communication

- Natural language understanding and reasoning in spoken dialogue systems

- Multimodal dialogue systems

- Dialogue management in practical implementations

- Categorisation of dialogue moves or speech acts in corpora

- Designing and evaluating dialogue systems

Submission is through Easychair:

http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=semdial2011

On the submission site, choose the category that is the closest fit to your paper; categories are used for assigning papers to area chairs, who follow each paper through its review process (we may reassign papers to distribute the load among the chairs).

Submitted papers should be in the following format:

- Anonymous PDF file

- 8 pages total (including data, tables, figures, and references)

- US letter paper size

- 11pt Times font

- 1 inch (2.5 cm) margins

- 2-column format

Include a one-paragraph abstract of the entire work (about 200 words). We strongly recommend using the style files provided by ACL-HLT 2011.

Multiple submissions by the same author or group of authors are allowed, but each person may only give one oral presentation at the workshop.

Deadline for receipt of papers is June 5, 2011, at 23:59 UTC-11.

Posters and Demos:

We will have a separate submission of late-breaking system demonstrations and ongoing project descriptions, to be presented in a poster session during the workshop. Late-breaking submissions will be two pages long; they will not be refereed, but evaluated for relevance only by the area chairs. Submission of late-breaking abstracts will be allowed only after review of the main session papers has concluded. The deadline for late-breaking submissions is August 7, 2011.

Proceedings:

Final, 8-page versions of the accepted papers, together with the 2-page accepted late-breaking abstracts, will be compiled in a proceedings volume and distributed (online or in print) at the workshop.

Important Dates:

Paper submissions due: June 5, 2011 (Sunday)

Author notification for full papers: July 29, 2011 (Friday)

Poster and demo submissions due: August 7, 2011 (Sunday)

Author notification for posters and demos: August 12, 2011 (Friday)

Camera-ready copies due: August 24, 2011 (Wednesday)

SemDial 2011 workshop: September 21-23, 2011 (Wednesday--Friday)

Organizers:

Ron Artstein: Area chair Theoretical Linguistics, Logic, and Conversation Analysis

David DeVault: Area chair Natural Language Processing

Kallirroi Georgila: Area chair Natural Language Processing

Elsi Kaiser: Area chair Psycholinguistics

Amanda Stent: Area chair

David Traum: Internal coordinator

Sudeep Gandhe: Sponsorship and fundraising

Mark Core: Demos and posters

Anton Leuski: Web site

Program Committee:

Hua Ai, Jennifer Arnold, Srinivas Bangalore, Luciana Benotti, Nate Blaylock, Johan Bos, Harry Bunt, Donna Byron, Herb Clark, Paul Dekker, Myroslava Dzikovska, Raquel Fern‡ndez, Victor Ferreira, Simon Garrod, Jonathan Ginzburg, Amy Isard, Andrew Kehler, Alistair Knott, Kazunori Komatani, Staffan Larsson, Gary Lee, Oliver Lemon, Colin Matheson, Gregory Mills, Yukiko Nakano, Stanley Peters, Martin Pickering, Chris Potts, Matthew Purver, Antoine Raux, Hannes Rieser, David Schlangen, Elizabeth Shriberg, Gabriel Skantze, Ronnie Smith, Matthew Stone, Nigel Ward, Michael White

If you have any questions, please write to one of the organizers. We do not have a dedicated email address.

SemDial 2011 homepage: http://projects.ict.usc.edu/nld/semdial2011

SemDial series homepage: http://www.illc.uva.nl/semdial