5th International Workshop on Spoken Dialog Systems (IWSDS 2014)

                                                 Situated Dialog

                            Napa, California, US, January 18-20, 2014

                                                www.iwsds.org

** ANNOUNCEMENT **

Following the success of IWSDS-2009 (Irsee, Germany), IWSDS-2010 (Gotemba Kogen Resort, Japan), IWSDS-2011 (Granada, Spain), and IWSDS-2012, (Paris, France), the Fifth International Workshop on Spoken Dialog Systems (IWSDS-2014) will be held in Napa, California, US on January 18-20, 2014.

The IWSDS Workshop series provides an international forum for the presentation of research and applications and for lively discussions among researchers as well as industrialists, with a special interest to the practical implementation of Spoken Dialog Systems in everyday applications.

To date many dialog systems have been developed for well-defined domains most notably information access and simple transactions. As spoken language technologies become more sophisticated more diverse domains have begun to be explored. One direction has been towards systems that are untethered and that do not rely on a clearly demarcated domain. More recently, researchers have begun to explore systems for domains that require a clear awareness of dynamic context and surroundings, also known as situated dialog systems. Such domains include robotic and automotive systems, but also systems found in mobile devices and in the cloud.

Situated dialog represents the next step in creating spoken language systems that can be used by humans as a part of everyday life but it presents new research challenges. For example perception becomes significantly more important as the current state of the world plays a role in the interaction; moreover situated dialog often requires more advanced reasoning capabilities than non-situated systems. Humans might also expect systems to understand and retain new information and be able to accept relatively complex direction. Many of these systems are used in hands-busy eyes-busy situations, where spoken language becomes the principal means of communication.

Areas of research that touch on Situated Dialog:              

* Auditory scene analysis and interpretation

* Acquisition and tracking of dialog channels

* Explicit and implicit grounding

* Out-of-Vocabulary inputs and their resolution

* Advanced conversational capabilities: Initiation and termination

* Managing multi-party dialogs

* Multi-modal interaction (gesture and gaze)

* Language-based learning and instruction

* Dialog interaction for robotic systems or kiosks

* Interfaces to automotive systems

* Spoken language for mobile applications

Research and development in the following areas are relevant to this meeting; we also invite the submission of original papers in any related area:

* Speech recognition and understanding, Dialog management, Adaptive

* Dialog modeling, Recognition of emotions from speech, gestures,

* Facial expressions and physiological data, Emotional and

* Interactional dynamic profile of the speaker during dialog, User

* Modeling, Planning and reasoning capabilities for coordination and

* Conflict description, Conflict resolution in complex multi-level

* Decisions, Multi-modality such as graphics, gesture and speech for

* Input and output, Fusion, fission and information management,

* Learning and adaptability, Visual processing and recognition for

* Advanced human-computer interaction, Spoken Dialog databases and

* Corpora, including methodologies and ethics, Objective and

* Subjective Spoken Dialog evaluation methodologies, strategies and

* Paradigms, Spoken Dialog prototypes and products, etc.

PAPER SUBMISSION

We particularly welcome papers that can be illustrated by a demonstration, and we will organize the conference in order to best accommodate these papers, whatever their category.  As usual, it is planned that a selection of accepted papers will be published in a book by Springer following the conference.  We distinguish between the following categories of submissions:

* Long Research Papers are reserved for reports on mature research

  results. The expected length of a long paper should be in the range

  of 6-10 pages, not including references.

* Short Research Papers should not exceed 6 pages in total. Authors

  may choose this category if they wish to report on smaller case

  studies or ongoing but interesting and original research.

* Demo - System Papers: Authors who wish to demonstrate their system

  may choose this category and provide a description of their system

  and demo. System papers should not exceed 6 pages in total.

IMPORTANT DATES:

October 13, 2013 (23:59 GMT)    Deadline for submission

November 18, 2013:       Author notification

December 2, 2013:          Deadline for final submission of accepted paper

December 23, 2013:        Final Program available online

January 18-20, 2014         Workshop

VENUE:

IWSDS 2014 will be held as a two-day residential seminar at  The Carneros Inn in Napa, USA, where attendees will be accommodated.

January 20th will be devoted to visits at laboratories in the Bay Area's Silicon Valley.

IWSDS Steering Committee: Gary Geunbae Lee (POSTECH, Pohang, Korea), Ramón López-Cózar (Univ. of Granada, Spain), Joseph Mariani (LIMSI and IMMI-CNRS, Orsay, France), Wolfgang Minker (Ulm Univ., Germany), Satoshi Nakamura (Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan)

Organizing Committee: Alexander Rudnicky (CMU) (Chair), Ian Lane (CMU), Antoine Raux (Lenovo), Teruhisa Misu (HRI USA)

Scientific Committee: Jan Alexandersson - DFKI, Germany; Masahiro Araki - Kyoto Institute of Technology, Japan; André Berton - Daimler, Germany; Dan Bohus - Microsoft, USA; Axel Buendia - SpirOps, France; Susan Burger - CMU, USA; Felix Burkhard - Deutsche Telekom Lab., Germany ; oraida Callejas - Univ. Granada, Spain; Heriberto Cuayahuitl

- DFKI, Germany; Yannick Estève - LIUM, France; Sadaoki Furui - Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan; David Griol - Univ. Carlos III de Madrid, Spain; Joakim Gustafson - KTH, Sweden; Olivier Hamon - ELDA, France; Paul Heisterkamp - Daimler, Germany; Dirk Heylen - Univ. Twente, The Netherlands; Ryuichiro Higashinaka - NTT, Japan; Julia Hirshberg - Columbia Univ., USA; Kristiina Jokinen - Helsinki Univ., Finland; Tatsuya Kawahara - Kyoto Univ., Japan; Harksoo Kim - Kangwon National University, Korea ;Hong Kook Kim - Gwangju Inst. of Science and Technology, Korea; Seokhwan Kim - Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore; Kazunori Komatani - Nagoya Univ, Japan; Fabrice Lefèvre - LIA, France; Haizhou Li - Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore; Matthew Marge - CMU, USA; Michael McTear - Univ. Ulster, UK; Yasuhiro Minami - NTT, Japan; Teruhisa Misu - HRI, USA; Mikio Nakano - Honda Resaerch Institute, Japan; Shrikanth S. Narayanan - SAIL, USA; Elmar Nöeth - Univ. Erlangen, Germany; Roberto Pieraccini - ICSI - Berkeley, USA; Olivier Pietquin - Sup'Elec, France; Norbert Reithinger - DFKI, Germany; Björn Schuller - Technische Universitaet Muenchen, Germany; Lizbeth Shriberg - ICSI, SRI and Microsoft, USA; Gabriel Skantze - KTH, Sweden; Sebastian Stüker - KIT, Germany; Kazuya Takeda - Nagoya Univ., Japan; Stefanie Tellex - Brown U., USA; David Traum - USC, USA; Hsin-min Wang - Academia Sinica, Taiwan; Nigel Ward

- UTEP, USA; Jason Williams - Microsoft, USA

Supporting organization: SIGdial

** Please contact air@cs.cmu.edu or visit www.iwsds.org for more information. **