Preliminary Call For Papers
SIGDIAL 2010 CONFERENCE
11th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue
University of Tokyo, Japan, September 24-25, 2010
(just before Interspeech 2010)
** Submission Deadline: May 7, 2010 **

CALL FOR PAPERS
The SIGDIAL venue provides a regular forum for the presentation of cutting edge research in discourse and dialogue to both academic and industry researchers. Continuing with a series of successful ten previous meetings, this conference spans the research interest area of discourse and dialogue. The conference is sponsored by the SIGDIAL organization, which serves as the Special Interest Group in discourse and dialogue for both ACL and ISCA. SIGDIAL 2010 will be co-located with Interspeech 2010 as a satellite event.

TOPICS OF INTEREST
We welcome formal, corpus-based, implementation, experimental, or analytical work on discourse and dialogue including, but not restricted to, the following 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.
SUBMISSIONS
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.).
Please use the official ACL style files: http://acl2010.org/authors.html

Papers that have been or will be submitted to other meetings or publications must provide this information (see submission format). SIGDIAL 2010 cannot accept for publication or presentation work that will be (or has been) published elsewhere. Any questions regarding submissions can be sent to the Co-Chairs.

Authors are encouraged to make illustrative materials available, on the web or otherwise. Examples might include excerpts of recorded conversations, recordings of human-computer dialogues, interfaces to working systems, and so on.

BEST PAPER AWARDS
In order to recognize significant advancements in dialog and discourse science and technology, SIGDIAL will again recognize a BEST PAPER AWARD and a BEST STUDENT PAPER AWARD. A selection committee consisting of prominent researchers in the fields of interest will select the recipients of the awards.

IMPORTANT DATES (SUBJECT TO CHANGE)
Submission: May 7, 2010
Notification of acceptance: June 30, 2010
Final submission: July 30, 2010
Conference: September 24-25, 2010


Websites
Workshop website: http://www.sigdial.org/workshops/workshop11
Submission link: To be announced
SIGdial organization website: http://www.sigdial.org
Interspeech 2010 website: http://www.interspeech2010.org

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
For any questions, please contact the appropriate members of the organizing committee:

GENERAL CO-CHAIRS
Yasuhiro Katagiri (Future University - Hakodate): katagiri[at]fun.ac.jp
Mikio Nakano (Honda Research Institute Japan): mnakano[at]acm.org

TECHNICAL PROGRAM CO-CHAIRS
Raquel Fernández (University of Amsterdam): raquel.fernandez[at]uva.nl
Oliver Lemon (Heriot Watt University): olemon[at]gmail.com

LOCAL CHAIR
Masato Ishizaki (University of Tokyo): masato.ishizaki[at]gmail.com

SIGDIAL PRESIDENT
Tim Paek (Microsoft Research): timpaek[at]microsoft.com

SIGDIAL VICE PRESIDENT
Amanda Stent (AT&T Labs - Research): amanda.stent[at]gmail.com

SIGDIAL SECRETARY/TREASURER
Kristiina Jokinen (University of Helsinki): kristiina.jokinen[at]helsinki.fi