(We apologize if you receive this message more than once) 1st Announcement 2nd ACL SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue Aalborg, Denmark, September 1-2 (Just before Eurospeech 2001-Scandinavia) More up to date information on submission schedule, formats, registration and program committee may be found at the workshop website Description Following up on the successful 1st Workshop in Hong Kong in October 2000, this will be the next in a series of workshops spanning the ACL SIGdial interest area of discourse and dialogue. While there has been a lot of activity in this area, and fairly frequent "specialty" workshops on various sub-topics, until this series there has not been a regular place for such research to be presented in a forum to receive attention from the larger SIGdial community and researchers outside this community. Invited Speakers: to be announced. Topics of Interest We welcome formal, corpus-based, implementational and analytical work on discourse and dialogue, with a focus on the following three themes: (i) Dialogue Systems Spoken, multi-modal, and text/web based dialogue systems including topics such as: * dialogue management models (specific subproblems or general modeling, in particular models for mixed initiative and user-adaptive dialogue); * speech, text, and graphics integration (for understanding or generation); * context-based interpretation and/or response planning,in particular how this contributes to natural interaction; * strategies for handling or preventing miscommuncation (repair and correction types, clarification and underspecificity, grounding and feedback strategies); * utilizing prosodic information for various types of disambiguation; * task-driven versus conversational dialogue; * evaluation of dialogue systems including task complexity measurements. (ii) Corpora and Corpus Tools Corpus-based work on discourse and spoken, text-based and multi-modal dialogue including its support, in particular: * issues and problems in discourse and dialogue annotation; * techniques (including machine learning), tools, coding schemes and data resources for discourse and dialogue studies; * XML-based tools for dialogue access to internet information. (iii) 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); * incremental (plan-based,topic-based, etc.) models of discourse/dialogue structure integrating referential and relational structure; * modeling genre-specific aspects of discourse and dialogue structure, including the specific structural aspects of (interactive) digital media; * prosody in discourse and dialogue; * modeling politeness and non-recursive parts of discourse and dialogue; * models of presupposition and accommodation; * operational models of conversational implicature. Submission of Papers and Abstracts The program committee welcomes the submission of papers for full plenary presentation. The papers must be no longer than 10 pages, including title page, 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. Besides papers for full plenary presentation, we encourage the submission of short 4-page papers (inclusive title page, examples, references, etc.) to be combined with a short presentation in the plenary session and a poster presentation. Full papers and short papers should be sent electronically to the e-mail address sigdial2001@ims.uni-stuttgart.de and must be received no later than May 7. The format to use for papers and abstracts is the same (ACL final paper format). Stylefiles are available at the workshop webpage: http://www.sigdial.org/sigdialworkshop01. Papers must be submitted in pdf (preferred) or postscript format. The title page should include the following information: Title: Authors' names, affiliations, and email addresses: Keywords (up to 5 keywords specifying subject area): Submission type (full paper or short paper submission): Abstract (short summary up to 5 lines): Important Dates Submission of full papers and short papers May 7 Notification June 20 Final submissions August 1 Workshop September 1-2 Workshop Publications Like full papers, short papers will be published in the workshop proceedings. Authors of a selected number of full papers accepted for the workshop proceedings will be asked to send in a version of their paper for the publication in a book on current directions and developments in discourse and dialogue, to be published by a renowned, international publisher. Panel Sessions In addition to the regular paper and abstract submissions, the program committee welcomes proposals for other relevant activities, such as reports of working groups and initiatives, and targeted discussion sessions. The program committee itself intends to organize two panel sessions, the descriptions of which will be given in later announcements, namely one specifically on spoken dialogue systems and the other on the pragmatics/semantics of discourse and dialogue being directly relevant to the first subject. Program Committee Co-Chairs: Jan van Kuppevelt (University of Stuttgart) and Ronnie Smith (East Carolina University) Organizing Committee Laila Dybkjaer (local chair), David Traum, Julia Hirschberg, Ronnie Smith, Jan van Kuppevelt. Contact Information: Questions about submission: Ronnie Smith/Jan van Kuppevelt Questions about local issues: Laila Dybkjaer Miscellaneous: David Traum