6th WORKSHOP ON KNOWLEDGE AND REASONING IN PRACTICAL DIALOGUE SYSTEMS

The sixth IJCAI workshop on "Knowledge and Reasoning in Practical Dialogue Systems" will focus on challenges of novel applications of practical dialogue systems. The venue for IJCAI 2009 is Pasadena Conference Center, California, USA.

• What kinds of novel applications have a need for natural language dialogue interaction?
• How can authoring tools for dialogue systems be developed such that application designers who are not experts in natural language can make use of these systems?
• How can one easily adapt a dialogue system to a new application?
• Methods for design and development of dialogue systems.
• What are the extra constraints and resources of a dialogue system for these novel applications, that might not be present in a speech or text only dialogue system or even traditional multi-modal interfaces?
• Representation of language resources for dialogue systems.
• The role of ontologies in dialogue systems
• Evaluation of dialogue systems, what to evaluate and how.
• Techniques and algorithms for adaptivity in dialogue systems on various levels, e.g. interpretation, dialogue strategy, and generation.
• Robustness and how to handle unpredictability.
• Architectures and frameworks for adaptive dialogue systems.
• Requirements and methods for development related to the architecture.

Who should attend

This workshop aims at bringing together researchers and practitioners that work on the development of communication models that support robust and efficient interaction in natural language, both for commercial dialogue systems and in basic research.

It should be of interest also for anyone studying dialogue and multimodal interfaces and how to coordinate different information sources. This involves theoretical as well as practical research, e.g. empirical evaluations of usability, formalization of dialogue phenomena and development of intelligent interfaces for various applications, including such areas as robotics.

Workshop format

The workshop will be kept small, with a maximum of 40 participants. Preference will be given to active participants selected on the basis of their submitted papers.

Each paper will be given ample time for discussion, more than what is customary at a conference. As said above, we encourage contributions of a critical or comparative nature that provide fuel for discussion. We also invite people to share their experiences of implementing and coordinating knowledge modules in their dialogue systems, and integrating dialogue components to other applications.

Schedule

Organizing Committee

Arne Jönsson (Chair)
Department of Computer and Information Science
Linköping University
S-581 83 Linköping, Sweden
tel: +46 13 281717
fax: +46 13 142231
email: arnjo@ida.liu.se

David Traum (Co-Chair)
Institute for Creative Technologies
University of Southern California
13274 Fiji Way
Marina del Rey, CA 90405 USA
tel: +1 (310) 574-5729
fax: +1 (310) 574-5725
email: traum@ict.usc.edu

Jan Alexandersson (Co-Chair)
German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, DFKI GmbH
Stuhlsatzenhausweg 3
D-66 123 Saarbrücken
Germany
tel: +49-681-3025347
fax: +49-681-3025341
email: jan.alexandersson@dfki.de

Ingrid Zukerman (Co-Chair)
Faculty of Information Technolog
Monash University
Clayton, Victoria 3800, Australia
tel: +61 3 9905-5202
fax: +61 3 9905-5146
email: ingrid@csse.monash.edu.au

Programme committee