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Abbreviation: EDAML Start date:
May 11, 2009 End date:
May 12, 2009 Location: Budapest
Organizers:
Dirk Heylen, University of Twente
Catherine Pelachaud, CNRS, TELECOM – ParisTech
Roberta Catizone, University of Sheffield
David R. Traum, University of Southern California
Proceedings
Look here.
History
Embodied Conversational Agents, ECAs, are virtual agents endowed
with human-like communicative capabilities. Over the last few years
there has been increasing collaborative effort across research
groups working on ECAs to define a common framework for ECA systems
under the name of SAIBA. The framework specifies three main
processes. The first, called Intent Planning, deals with the
computation of the communicative intents and the emotional state of
the agent. The second, Behavior Planning, computes how to convey
high-level information through verbal and nonverbal means. The third
and last module, Behavior Realizer, instantiates the behaviors into
acoustic and visual parameters that are sent, respectively, to a
speech synthesizer and an animation player[drt1]. These three
modules exchange data (communicative intentions between the first
and second ones, and behaviors between the last two). Together with
the specification of the three main processes, SAIBA proposes the
use of two mark-up languages to encode the flow of data. The first
language is called Function Markup Language (FML) while the second
one is called Behavior Markup Language (BML). While quite a lot of
work has been done to define BML, FML is still in its infant stages.
A first workshop at AAMAS 2008 gathered researchers for a first
broad discussion about the issues surrounding FML, the state of the
art in existing systems and brainstorming about the way to go
forward.
Focus
While the first workshop aimed to define the scope of the
information the language should cover, in this workshop we aim to
further elaborate on one specific aspect of FML. A major concern
that appeared in almost all of the papers presented in the first
workshop was that of conversational acts, also called speech acts or
dialogue acts. In this workshop we will look at the relevance of the
taxonomies that have been proposed in the literature and the way
these can be used or should be adapted and extended for the ECA
domain.
Background
Several taxonomies of dialogue act types have been proposed for use
in analyzing human dialogue behavior and as units of interpretation
and production in dialogue systems. Examples are: Meta-locutionary
acts (Novick, 1988), Conversation acts (Traum & Allen 1991), The
HCRC coding scheme (Carletta et al 1996), and the Verbmobil coding
scheme (Alexandersson et al 1997). These taxonomies encompass the
different functions of dialogue acts such as information seeking,
turn management and feedback and have been widely used to annotate
corpora. Within the computational linguistics community, a series of
meetings of an informal working group called the Discourse Resource
Initiative produced a unifying scheme known as DAMSL (Allen&Core,
1997), which has been very influential and adapted for many
projects. See (Traum, 2000) for a comparison of taxonomies and
issues for such taxonomies. More recent efforts including European
projects such as MATE and LIRICS have extended this work and
produced new schemes such as DIT++ (Bunt et al, 2008). These
dialogue act taxonomies can be used to further the development of
FML. As dialogue act specification is a core component of any
specification of communicative intent, perhaps one of these schemes
can be adopted or extended for suitability for ECAs, or can at least
inspire the development of FML. One key difference between the
coverage of most of these schemes and ECAs is that ECAs communicate
through verbal and nonverbal means so many of these schemes will
need to be extended for use in FML.
Issues
With this workshop we aim to raise the following questions:
* what are the strengths and weakness of the dialogue acts standards
and their potential use in FML?
* in what ways should they be extended?
* in what ways do they miss the mark?
* can they be used for multimodality?
* how can a dialogue act result in the animation of verbal and/or
nonverbal behaviours?
* how can and should synchrony between modalities be tied in the
dialogue act representation?
* what can we learn from the standardisation effort (the way the
process went, the way the standard is being used/adopted/adapted...)?
* how/whether ASR signal/emotion features could/should be
represented in Dialogue Acts?
We invite position papers addressing one or more of the following aspects:
* legacy: how can multimodal dialog acts be represented
* desires: how do researchers believe these dialog acts should be
specified in FML
* expertise: contributions of researchers in cognitive
modelling/dialogue
Purpose
The purpose of this full-day workshop is to bring together
researchers and developers of embodied conversational characters
together with dialogue act specialists to exchange ideas and
experiences on the various aspects involved in dialogue act
specification for ECAs.
Format
Submissions should be of 8 pages maximum, following AAMAS specified
style. Position papers of 2 pages are also allowed. Submissions
should be sent as pdf-files to the workshop contact: heylen AT
ewi.utwente.nl
Important dates:
Submission: Feb 15, 2009
Notification: March 1, 2009
Camera ready Copy: March 15
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