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<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 color=navy face=Arial><span style='font-size:
10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:navy'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span lang=EN-GB style='font-size:
10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span lang=EN-GB style='font-size:
10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Towards a Standard Markup Language for Embodied
Dialogue Acts<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span lang=EN-GB style='font-size:
10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Workshop held in conjunction with AAMAS 2009<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span lang=EN-GB style='font-size:
10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>11 or 12 May 2009<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span lang=EN-GB style='font-size:
10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span lang=EN-GB style='font-size:
10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Budapest – Hungary<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span lang=EN-GB style='font-size:
10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span lang=EN-GB style='font-size:
10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Organizers:<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span lang=EN-GB style='font-size:
10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span lang=EN-GB style='font-size:
10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Dirk Heylen, University of Twente<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span lang=EN-GB style='font-size:
10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Catherine Pelachaud, CNRS, TELECOM – ParisTech<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span lang=EN-GB style='font-size:
10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Roberta Catizone, University of Sheffield<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span lang=EN-GB style='font-size:
10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>David R. Traum, University of Southern California<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span lang=EN-GB style='font-size:
10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span lang=EN-GB style='font-size:
10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>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.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span lang=EN-GB style='font-size:
10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span lang=EN-GB style='font-size:
10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>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.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span lang=EN-GB style='font-size:
10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span lang=EN-GB style='font-size:
10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>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. <o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span lang=EN-GB style='font-size:
10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span lang=EN-GB style='font-size:
10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>With this workshop we aim to raise the following
questions:<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span lang=EN-GB style='font-size:
10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>* what are the strengths and weakness of the dialogue
acts standards and their potential use in FML? <o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span lang=EN-GB style='font-size:
10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>* in what ways should they be extended?<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span lang=EN-GB style='font-size:
10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>* in what ways do they miss the mark?<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span lang=EN-GB style='font-size:
10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>* can they be used for multimodality?<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span lang=EN-GB style='font-size:
10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>* how can a dialogue act result in the animation of
verbal and/or nonverbal behaviours?<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span lang=EN-GB style='font-size:
10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>* how can and should synchrony between modalities be
tied in the dialogue act representation?<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span lang=EN-GB style='font-size:
10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>* what can we learn from the standardisation effort
(the way the process went, the way the standard is being
used/adopted/adapted...)?<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span lang=EN-GB style='font-size:
10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>* how/whether ASR signal/emotion features
could/should be represented in Dialogue Acts? <o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span lang=EN-GB style='font-size:
10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span lang=EN-GB style='font-size:
10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>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.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span lang=EN-GB style='font-size:
10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span lang=EN-GB style='font-size:
10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>We invite position papers addressing one or more of
the following issues:<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span lang=EN-GB style='font-size:
10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>* legacy: how can multimodal dialog acts be
represented <o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span lang=EN-GB style='font-size:
10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>* desires: how do researchers believe these dialog
acts should be specified in FML<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span lang=EN-GB style='font-size:
10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>* expertise: contributions of researchers in
cognitive modelling/dialogue<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span lang=EN-GB style='font-size:
10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span lang=EN-GB style='font-size:
10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>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<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span lang=EN-GB style='font-size:
10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span lang=EN-GB style='font-size:
10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Important dates:<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span lang=EN-GB style='font-size:
10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Submission: Feb 10, 2009<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span lang=EN-GB style='font-size:
10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Notification: March 1, 2009<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span lang=EN-GB style='font-size:
10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Camera ready Copy: March 15<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span lang=EN-GB style='font-size:
10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> <o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
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