Call for papers: Workshop on dialogue and perception (DaP 2018)

Conference dates: June 14-15, 2018

Venue: Wallenberg Conference Centre, University of Gothenburg

Organised by CLASP, University of Gothenburg

The study of dialogue investigates how natural language is used in interaction between interlocutors and how coordination and successful communication is achieved. Dialogue is multimodal, situated and embodied, with non-linguistic factors such as attention, eye gaze and gesture critical to understanding communication. However, studies on dialogue have often taken for granted that we align our perceptual representations, which are taken to be part of common ground (grounding in dialogue, Clark, 1996). They have also typically remained silent about how we integrate information from different sources and modalities and the different contribution of each of these. These assumptions are unsustainable when we consider interactions between agents with obviously different perceptual capabilities, as is the case in dialogues between humans and artificial agents, such as avatars or robots.

Contrarily, studies of perception have focussed on how an agent interacts with and interprets the information from their perceptual environment. There is significant research on how language is grounded in perception, how words are connected to perceptual representations and agent’s actions and therefore assigned meaning (grounding in action and perception, Harnad, 1990). In the last decade there has been impressive progress on integrated approaches to language, action, and perception, especially with the introduction of deep learning methods in the field of image descriptions that use end-to-end training from data. However, these have a limited integration to the dynamics of dialogue and often fail to take into account the incremental and context sensitive nature of language and the environment.

The aim of this workshop is to initiate a genuine dialogue between these related areas and to examine different approaches from computational, linguistic and psychological perspectives and how these can inform each other. It will feature invited talks by leading researchers in these areas, and high level contributed papers, presented as posters, selected through open competition and rigorous review.

We invite anonymous submissions of between 2-4 pages of content and up to one additional page for references, following the ACL style guidelines. The conference proceedings will be published online, with an ISSN, on the CLASP website. Authors will have the opportunity to extend their papers for the post-proceedings and will retain the copyright of their papers and be free to publish them elsewhere, with acknowledgement.

Registration is free and participation is open. We warmly invite everyone to attend.

Submission of papers:

EasyChair submission address: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=dap2018

LaTeX style files: http://acl2018.org/downloads/acl18-latex.zip

Word style files: http://acl2018.org/downloads/acl18-word.zip

Important dates:

1. Deadline for submission: April 4, 2018
2. Notification of authors: April 20, 2018
3. Camera ready papers due: May 2, 2018

Accepted Invited Speakers (so far):

Jacob Andreas, University of California, Berkeley
Mary Ellen Foster, University of Glasgow
Alexia Galati, University of California, Merced CANCELLED
Pat Healey, Queen Mary University of London
Ruth Kempson, King's College London
Per Linell, University of Gothenburg
Gabriel Skantze, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm

Programme Committee:

Ellen Breitholtz -- University of Gothenburg
Joyce Chai -- Michigan State University
Simon Dobnik -- University of Gothenburg (Programme co-chair)
Arash Eshghi -- Heriot Watt University, Edinburgh
Kallirroi Georgila -- University of Southern California
Jennifer Gerwing -- Akershus University Hospital, Oslo
Jonathan Ginzburg -- Universite Paris-Diderot, Paris 7
Eleni Gregoromichelaki -- Heinrich Heine University, Dusseldorf
John Kelleher -- Dublin Institute of Technology
Judith Holler -- Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen
Christine Howes -- University of Gothenburg (Programme co-chair)
Staffan Larsson -- University of Gothenburg
Greg Mills -- Groningen University
James Pustejovsky -- Brandeis University
David Schlangen -- Bielefeld University
Candy Sidner -- Worcester Polytechnic Institute
Matthew Stone -- Rutgers
Ielka van der Sluis -- University of Groningen
Diedrich Wolter -- University of Bamberg