Call for Papers Workshop on Conversational Systems May 4, 2000, following ANLP/NAACL 2000 The purpose of this workshop is to focus the discourse and dialogue community on best practices as well as theory of conversational systems, both speech based and text based. The workshop will also bring together creators of working conversational systems to discuss their efforts, both successes and limitations. In this workshop we encourage papers on either theoretical or applied research with a focus on results in working systems. We also welcome papers on working systems that provide a critical appraisal of their capabilities as well as their limitations; we encourage such papers to provide the criteria of critique that the authors feel are most relevant to their work. This workshop will consider in particular: - How can systems be designed so that it is easier to build applications in new domains? - What significant features of dialogue are beyond current working systems? What proposals show the most promise for capturing these features? - What knowledge does a system need to represent about a domain, tasks and discourse to support intelligent conversational interaction? - What can be learned from data and what should be learned from data? Can robust systems be built for domains where there is not a large amount of data available? - What is the role of natural language generation in conversational systems? - What aspects of discourse prosody are now feasible in conversational systems? - What aspects of nonverbal behavior are now feasible -- and worthwhile implementing -- in conversational systems? - How can the real-world performance of conversational systems be measured and anticipated? How can the performance of different systems be compared? In addition to the presentation of papers and the discussions that will result from them, we plan demonstration sessions and a panel session. The demonstration sessions will be open to anyone who wishes to bring their conversational systems for demonstration to other members of the workshop. Presenters are asked to submit a paper that is specifically directed at a demonstration of their current systems. These papers should cover the following topics as well as others the presenters think are relevant: -a short system description, -an example dialogue or dialogues, as space permits, -discussion of the most important contribution of the work, -discussion of the most significant limitation of the work. These papers will be included in the workshop proceedings. In the panel session we plan to bring together a set of experts to compare various approaches (including frame-based, finite-state, plan-based and statistical and logical reasoning-based) to dialogue in working conversational systems. A website which will provide additional information on the workshop as it becomes available is located at: http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/traum/ConvSys/. I. IMPORTANT DATES Paper submission deadline: February 4, 2000 Notification of acceptance for papers: March 1, 2000 Camera ready papers due: March 13, 2000 Workshop date: May 4, 2000 II. FORMAT FOR SUBMISSION Submissions must use the ACL latex style or ACL Microsoft Word style, both of which can be found at http://www.gte.com/AboutGTE/gto/anlp-naacl2000/cfp_submission.html. Paper submissions should consist of a full paper of 8 pages (including references). Please send submission questions to Alex Rudnicky,air@cs.cmu.edu, before, not after, January 31, 2000. Submission Procedure: Electronic submission only: send the pdf (preferred), postscript or MS Word form of your submission to: Alex Rudnicky, air@cs.cmu.edu. The Subject line should be "ANLP-NAACL2000 WORKSHOP PAPER SUBMISSION". Because reviewing is blind, no author information is included as part of the paper. An identification page must be sent in a separate email with the subject line: "ANLP-NAACL2000 WORKSHOP ID PAGE" and must include title, all authors, theme area, keywords, word count, and an abstract of no more than 5 lines. Late submissions will not be accepted. Notification of receipt will be e-mailed to the first author shortly after receipt. The Organizing Committee for this workshop includes: Candy Sidner, Lotus (Chair) James Allen, Univ. of Rochester Harald Aust, Philips Corp. Phil Cohen, Oregon Graduate Institute Justine Cassell, Media Lab, MIT Laila Dybkjaer, University of Southern Denmark X.D. Huang, Microsoft Masato Ishizaki, Japan Adv. Institute of Science and Technology Candace Kamm, AT&T Lin-Shan Lee, Taiwan University Susann Luperfoy, Akamai Technologies Patti Price, SRI International Owen Rambow, AT&T Norbert Reithinger, DFKI Saarbruecken Alex Rudnicky, Carnegie Mellon University Stephanie Seneff, MIT Dave Stallard, BBN/GTE David Traum, University of Maryland Marilyn Walker, AT&T Wayne Ward, Univ of Colorado, Boulder