IJCAI-99 Workshop on
KNOWLEDGE AND REASONING IN PRACTICAL DIALOGUE SYSTEMS
2 August 1999, Stockholm

Officially endorsed by SIGDial

Important Dates | Submission Procedure |
Organizing Committee | Programme Committee | Further information | Participants


News

2000-03-22

Selected papers from the workshop will be published in a special issue of Intelligent Dialogue Systems of the ETAI area "Intelligent User Interfaces". Currently papers are discussed on the discussion page

To obtain a copy of the WS-proceedings please send an e-mail to prof. Anita Kollerbaur anita@dsv.su.se and ask for a copy -- she will charge you 100 SEK + postage.


Workshop program


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:

Participants

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.
According to IJCAI rules, all workshop attendees must register for the main conference.

Workshop format

Ample time is allowed for commenting on the papers and open group discussion, thus ensuring time for discussions that go beyond ordinary conference style commenting. The workshop is intended to be a genuinely interactive event and a forum where new ideas and insights can take form via the collaboration of experts with diverse backgrounds. Demonstration of software could be organised as part of the main IJCAI conference.

Program comittee


Submissions

Potential participants are invited to submit extended abstracts on the topics outlined above. Submissions should be no longer than 6 (six) pages exclusive of references, single spaced, and be in line with the IJCAI-style sheet, obtainable from http://www.dsv.su.se/ijcai-99/

Electronic submissions (in postscript format) should be sent to Jan Alexandersson at: jan.alexandersson@dfki.de
Alternatively, three hardcopies can be mailed to the corresponding address below.

Jan Alexandersson
DFKI GmbH
Stuhlsatzenhausweg 3
D-66123 Saarbrücken
GERMANY

The accepted papers will be published in the workshop proceedings which will be distributed to each participant. Further publication channels will be explored and decided at the workshop.

Important dates

Electronic submission deadline: 1 March, 1999

Paper submission deadline: 3 March, 1999

Notification of acceptance: 23 April, 1999

Audio-visual requirements for accepted papers: 30 April, 1999

Camera-ready paper for the workshop notes: 21 May, 1999

Workshop: 2 August, 1999


Organizing Committee

Lars Ahrenberg (Co-chair) 
Department of Computer and Information Science 
Linköping University 
S-581 83 Linköping, Sweden 
tel: +46 13 282422 
fax: +46 13 142231 
email: lah@ida.liu.se
Jan Alexandersson (Chair) 
German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, DFKI GmbH 
Stuhlsatzenhausweg 3 
66 123 Saarbrücken 
Germany 
tel: +49-681-3025347 
fax: +49-681-3025341 
email: jan.alexandersson@dfki.de
Kristiina Jokinen (Co-chair) 
ATR Interpreting Telecommunications Research Laboratories 
2-2 Hikaridai, Seika-cho, Soraku-gun 
Kyoto 619-0288 Japan 
tel: +81-774-95-1342 
fax: +81-774-95-1308 
email: kjokinen@itl.atr.co.jp
Arne Jönsson (Co-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
 

Further information

Should you have any questions or need additional information on the workshop, please contact any of the organizing committee members by e-mail or at the addresses above.
Further information on the IJCAI-99 conference, including updated information on hotel and travel information, can be obtained from
the IJCAI home page. Information on IJCAI workshops is available at the IJCAI workshop home page.
Updated information on this workshop and the final papers will be made available via the workshop home page.