Scope of the Special Issue

Applications utilizing spoken natural language interaction are becoming increasingly common, mainly due to the development of speech technology. Apart from speech recognition and speech synthesis, however, these systems require dialogue capabilities that would allow users to be engaged in a natural and efficient interaction.

For the sake of robustness and portability current practical dialogue systems tend to rely on simple models for dialogue management (e.g. state transition diagrams or dialogue grammars) and simple representations (if any) of domain or task knowledge (e.g. frames) and for certain applications, such as information retrieval from a database, these models actually appear to be sufficient. On the other hand, dialogue models developed within AI tend to emphasize the relation between utterances and speakers' goals and plans, the importance of being able to reason about other agents' beliefs and intentions, and the need for domain knowledge and discourse representation for resolving anaphoric and deictic references. Somewhere in between we also find proposals that either augment the simpler dialogue models with generic and specific domain knowledge, or restrict the role of plan inference to specific situations. The workshop aims at studying the need for knowledge and reasoning in dialogue systems from theoretical and practical perspectives. Besides the innovative aspect of research, an emphasis is also laid on the importance of implemented dialogue systems as test-beds for evaluating the usefulness of theories and ideas, and on improvements in practical system abilities supporting a more natural and efficient interaction. We primarily seek contributions which discuss one or more of the following issues:

• What is the relation between different proposed knowledge sources, such as discourse models, task models, domain models, conceptual models and user models?
• How are such models integrated and coordinated?
• What are their roles in dialogue systems and how can they improve the analysis/generation of user/system utterances?
• What types of knowledge and reasoning is useful for various kinds of applications and situations?
• How can domain models and discourse models be used to handle focus and topic shifts? Do the models support topic associations in free conversations?
• How dependent is the system's functioning on a particular domain model? Can modularity of a system be supported if its domain model is changed to a different one?
• Can domain models be automatically built? How can empirical methods be used in building domain models?
• How can we evaluate domain models and their importance to the dialogue systems?