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 Bühler, 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 Jönsson, Linköping University Sweden Staffan Larsson,
Göteborg University Ramón López-Cózar 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