Fourth International Workshop on Human-Computer Conversation

Call for papers

The purpose of the workshop is to bring together academic researchers and industrialists concerned with all aspects of human-computer conversation and the associated research issues of emotion, relationships, companionship, embodiment, ECAs, memory, evaluation etc. that persistent, personalised computational agents will need solutions for if they are to exist (as they will) in the reasonably near future.

The earlier workshops in this series (see First and Third) were highly successful at getting industry groups to display their interests and prototypes, as did university and independent researchers.

Since 2000, there has been a great upsurge in research funding, and another aim of the meeting will be to bring together members of currently active research consortia in the EU and US, such as CALLAS, CALO, COSY, AMIDA, INDIGO, SOPRANO and others. The workshop is being held under the auspices of the EU 6FP IP Companions Project (2006-2010).

Bellagio and the Villa Serbelloni are among the finest spots in the world for thought and reflection.

Papers

• David Benyon, Preben Hansen and Nick Webb: Evaluating Human-Computer Conversation in Companions (PDF, 170kb)
• Roberta Catizone, Simon Worgan, Yorick Wilks, Alexiei Dingli and Weiwei Cheng (2008) A Multimodal Conversational Companion for Reminiscing about Images (PDF, 130kb)
• Silvie Cinková, Jan Hajič, Jan Ptáček: An Annotation Scheme for Speech Reconstruction on a Dialog Corpus (PDF, 340kb)
• Debora Field, Simon Worgan, Nick Webb, Mark Hepple, Yorick Wilks: Automatic Induction of Dialogue Structure from the Companions Dialogue Corpus (PDF, 60kb)
• Jaakko Hakulinen, Markku Turunen, Cameron Smith, Marc Cavazza, Daniel Charlton: A Model for Flexible Interoperability between Dialogue Management and Domain Reasoning for Conversational Spoken Dialogue Systems (PDF, 140kb)
• Milan Legát, Martin Grüber, Pavel Ircing: Wizard of Oz Data Collection for the Czech Senior Companion Dialogue System (PDF, 1MB)
• Jan Ptáček: Two Tectogrammatical Realizers Side by Side: Case of English and Czech (PDF, 200kb)
• Olov Ståhl, Björn Gambäck, Preben Hansen, Markku Turunen, Jaakko Hakulinen: A Mobile Fitness Companion (PDF, 170kb)
• Markku Turunen, Jaakko Hakulinen, Olov Ståhl, Björn Gambäck, Preben Hansen, Mari C. Rodríguez Gancedo, Raúl Santos de la Cámara, Cameron Smith, Daniel Charlton, Marc Cavazza: Multimodal Agent Interfaces and System Architectures for Health and Fitness Companions (PDF, 550kb)
• Dimitrios Vogiatzis, Constantine D. Spyropoulos, Stasinos Konstantopoulos, Vangelis Karkaletsis, Zerrin Kasap, Colin Matheson and Olivier Deroo: An Affective Robot Guide to Museums (PDF, 180kb)
• Simon Worgan, Roger Moore: Enabling Reinforcement Learning for Open Dialogue Systems through Speech Stress Detection (PDF, 300kb)
• Enrico Zovato, Jan Romportl: Speech synthesis and emotions: a compromise between flexibility and believability (PDF, 100kb)

Programme Committee

• James Allen (University of West Florida)
• Ellizabeth Andre (University of Augsburg)
• David Benyon (Napier University)
• Christopher Brewster (University of Sheffield)
• Harry Bunt (University of Tilburg)
• Marc Cavazza (University of Teesside)
• Emmet Coin (ejTalk, USA)
• Oliver Lemon (University of Edinburgh)
• Bjorn Gamback (SICS, Stockholm)
• Louise Guthrie (University of Sheffield)
• Aravind Joshi (University of Pennsylvania)
• Anton Nijholt (University of Twente)
• Catherine Pelachaud (University of Paris)
• Steve Pulman (University of Oxford)
• Akira Shimazu (JAIST, Japan)
• Tomek Strzalkowski (University of Albany)
• Markku Turunen (University of Tampere)
• Tom Wachtel (Consultant, Italy)
• Mats Wiren (Voice Provider, Stockholm)