SECOND CALL FOR PAPERS

Workshop on "Coherence in generation and dialogue"

August 7th - 11th 2006

organized as part of the European Summer School on Logic, Language and Information
(ESSLLI 2006)
31 July - 11 August, 2006, Málaga, Spain

Deadline for 2000-word abstracts: March 8th 2006

This workshop is endorsed by SIGdial.

Workshop Organizers:

Rodger Kibble, Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK

Paul Piwek, Open University, UK

Ielka van der Sluis, University of Aberdeen, UK

Email contact: mcs-coherence-workshop<at>open.ac.uk
(Substitute @ sign for <at>)
Important: this replaces an incorrect address in earlier verions of the call that had underscores in place of hyphens.

Invited speakers

Nicholas Asher, University of Texas at Austin, USA

Robbert Jan Beun, Universiteit Utrecht, NL

Workshop Purpose:

This workshop aims to compare and contrast different ways of modelling coherence in natural language generation and dialogue in order to guide decisions such as:

• what is an appropriate response at a given point in a dialogue?
• what is the optimal ordering of propositions in a discourse?
• how should predicates, referring expressions and rhetorical relations be realised (verbally and/or non-verbally) so that the resulting utterance can be interpreted naturally and fluently?

Workshop Topics:

Approaches to coherence modelling can be broadly summarised under three main headings: mentalistic, abstract/formal and social/normative, which are described below. We welcome submissions from graduate students or established researchers that focus on generation tasks and either exemplify one of these approaches or offer comparisons or constructive criticisms of one or more frameworks.

Authors should make clear in their submissions:

• how they interpret the notion of "coherence" and how their work contributes to a deeper understanding of this notion;
• the applicability of their work to generation tasks.

Possible topics are listed as bullet points below, but this list is not intended to be exhaustive.

1. mentalistic: modelling attentional states, intentions, purpose etc, as in e.g. Grosz and Sidner, Cohen and Levesque, Bunt, Ginzburg's QUD, Mann and Thompson's Rhetorical Structure Theory:
   • content selection on the basis of the preconditions of the next turn (meaning and purpose)
   • context dynamics and grounding
   • local interactions, participants and particular situations
   • intentions wrt dialogue plan and wrt collaboration
   • how to combine multiple dialogue acts per utterance?
2. abstract formal models: SDRT, Webber's D-LTAG, some interpretations of Centering:
   • textual coherence: consistency of syntactic resources and thematic development of discourse thematic structure + focus shifting
   • concept coherence: clear references- how often can the same referring expression be repeated? (overspecification)
   • generation via templates or grammar (fast or incremental)
   • relevance
   • consistency and truth maintenance.
3. social/normative, using notions like obligation and commitment: e.g. Traum and Poesio, Walton and Krabbe, Brandom:
   • interaction management and dialogue control
   • turn taking, feedback, clarification and repair
   • obligations to address questions or to acknowledge assertions
   • conditional obligations to execute directives
   • commitments to defend an assertion if queried
   • overt or implicit retraction of commitments
   • sanctions for failure to meet commitments and obligations

Submission Details:

Authors should submit abstracts of up to 2000 words in PDF format to the email contact address given above. The submissions will be reviewed by the workshop's programme committee and additional reviewers. The accepted papers will appear in the workshop proceedings published by ESSLLI. Final versions may be up to 8 pages and must be formatted in LaTeX, using style files which will be specified at the time of notification.

Proceedings will also be published electronically by the workshop organisers. We are in discussion with the editors of the Journal for Logic, Language and Information (JoLLI) about the possibility of publishing a selection of high-quality papers from the workshop as a special issue, after a further round of reviewing.

Workshop Format:

The workshop is part of ESSLLI and is open to all ESSLLI participants. It will consist of five 90-minute sessions held over five consecutive days in the second week of ESSLLI. There will be 2 - 3 slots for paper presentation and discussion per session. On the first day the workshop organizers will give an introduction to the topic, followed by a talk by our invited speaker.

Programme committee

(to date, further names may be added):

Rieks op den Akker
Harry Bunt
Raquel Fernandez
Jonathan Ginzburg
Dirk Heylen
Erik Krabbe
Emiel Krahmer
Peter Kuhnlein
Jill Nickerson
Massimo Poesio
Richard Power
Matthew Purver
Hannes Rieser
Donia Scott
Wilbert Spooren
Matthew Stone
Mariet Theune
Sandra Williams

Important Dates:

Local Arrangements

All workshop participants including the presenters will be required to register for ESSLLI. The registration fee for authors presenting a paper will correspond to the early student/workshop speaker registration fee. Moreover, a number of additional fee waiver grants might be made available by the local organizing committee on a competitive basis and workshop participants are eligible to apply for those.

There will be no reimbursement for travel costs or accommodation. Workshop speakers who have difficulty in finding funding should contact the local organizing committee to ask for the possibilities of a grant.

Further Information

About ESSLLI