First Announcement 7th SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue Sydney, July, 15-16, 2006 Continuing with a series of successful workshops in Hong Kong, Aalborg, Philadelphia, Sapporo and Lisboa 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. Topics of Interest We welcome formal, corpus-based, implementational 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. Submission of Papers and Abstracts 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.) Papers that have been or will be submitted to other meetings or publications must provide this information (see submission format). SIGdial 06 cannot accept for publication or presentation work that will be (or has been) published elsewhere. 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 (subject to change) Submission February 13, 2006 Notification March 20, 2006 Final submissions April 17, 2006 Workshop July 15-16, 2006 Websites Workshop website: http://sigdial06.dfki.de Sigdial website: http://www.sigdial.org COLING/ACL website: http://www.acl2006.org Program Committee (confirmed) Jan Alexandersson, DFKI GmbH Germany (co-chair) Alistair Knott, Otago University New Zeeland (co-chair) Masahiro Araki, Kyoto Institute of Technology Japan Ellen Bard, University of Edinburgh UK Johan Bos, University of Edinburgh UK Johan Boye, Telia Research Sweden Dirk B=FChler, University of Ulm, Germany Sandra Carberry, University of Delaware USA Rolf Carlson, KTH Sweden Jennifer Chu-Carroll, IBM Research USA Mark Core, University of Edinburgh UK Laila Dybkjaer, University of Southern Denmark Sadaoki Furui, Tokyo Institute of Technology Japan Jonathan Ginzburg, King's College London UK Iryna Gurevych, Darmstadt University of Technology Germany Joakim Gustafson, Teliasonera Sweden Masato Ishizaki, University of Tokyo Japan Michael Johnston, AT&T Research USA Pamela Jordan, University of Pittsburgh Arne J=F6nsson, Link=F6ping University Sweden Staffan Larsson, G=F6teborg University Ram=F3n L=F3pez-C=F3zar Delgado, University of Granada Spain Susann Luperfoy, Stottler Henke Associates USA Michael McTear, University of Ulster UK Wolfgang Minker, Ulm University Germany Sharon Oviatt, Oregon Health and Sciences University USA Tim Paek, Microsoft Research USA Norbert Pfleger, DFKI GmbH Germany Roberto Pieraccini, Tell-Eureka USA Massimo Poesio, University of Essex UK Norbert Reithinger, DFKI GmbH Germany Alex Rudnicky, Carnegie Mellon University USA David Schlangen, University of Potsdam Germany Candy Sidner, Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL) USA Ronnie Smith, East Carolina University USA Matthew Stone, Rutgers University USA Marc Swerts, Tilburg University The Netherlands David Traum, USC/ICT USA Bonnie Webber, University of Edinburgh UK Janyce Wiebe, University of Pittsburgh USA Ingrid Zukerman, Monash University Australia