A Special Issue of the International Journal of Human Computer
Studies/Knowledge Acquisition
Guest Editor:
Susan McRoy
Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Milwaukee, WI 53211, USA
mcroy@cs.uwm.edu
Deadline for submissions is December 31, 1996
http://tigger.cs.uwm.edu/~mcroy/mnm-si/
Call for Papers
Any computer system that communicates must be able to cope with the
possibility of miscommunication--including misunderstanding,
non-understanding, and misinterpretation:
* In misunderstanding, one participant obtains an interpretation that she
believes is complete and correct, but which is, however, not the one
that the other speaker intended her to obtain.
* In non-understanding, a participant either fails to obtain any
interpretation at all, or obtains more than one interpretation, with no
way to choose among them.
* In misinterpretation, the most likely interpretation of a participant's
utterance suggests that their beliefs about the world are unexpectedly
out of alignment with the other's.
All three forms of miscommunication can eventually lead to repair in a
dialogue; however, misinterpretations and non-understandings are typically
recognized immediately, whereas a participant is not aware, at least
initially, when a misunderstanding occurs. Additionally, misinterpretation
can be a source of misunderstanding.
Early work on robust interaction with computers concerned the correction of
spelling or grammatical errors in a user's utterance so that the system
could more easily match them against a fixed linguistic model; work has also
been done in the area of speech recognition, attempting to find the best fit
of a sound signal to legal sequences of linguistic objects. Other systems
have attempted to detect misconceptions in the user's model of the domain of
discourse. All of these approaches have assumed that the system's model is
always correct. More recently, researchers have been looking at detecting
and correcting errors in the system's model of an interaction. This work
includes research on speech repairs, miscommunication, misunderstanding,
non-understanding, and related work in planning, such as plan misrecognition
and plan repair.
The purpose of this special issue is to present important results by
researchers who are developing theoretical models of robust interaction or
are designing robust systems. Topics of interest include, but are not
limited to, the following:
* Theories that delineate what knowledge must be represented, how it will
be obtained and updated, and how responsibility for achieving
robustness might be distributed among the interactants.
* Strategies for identifying POTENTIAL causes of breakdowns, such as
ambiguities, misconceptions, and plan misrecognition, in order to avert
miscommunication.
* Strategies for identifying symptoms of ACTUAL breakdowns, such as
deviations from expected behavior, unresolvable ambiguities, and speech
errors.
* Techniques for correcting errors in interpretation that have been used
in other areas of AI, such as plan recognition and computer vision, and
in related areas, such as human-computer interaction and multimedia.
* Approaches to minimizing and correcting miscommunication in tutoring
systems and education.
* Empirical data regarding the occurrence of miscommunication and
approaches to robust communication that derive from empirical methods.
* Research in knowledge representation that would be useful in detecting,
repairing, and preventing miscommunication.
We welcome papers that present emipirical results, theoretical models, or
implemented systems addressing the problem of detecting, repairing, or
preventing human-machine miscommunication.
Submissions
Please send your submission to the directly to the guest editor, Susan
McRoy. Email submissions in postscript (but not mime encoded) are preferred
and should be sent to mnm-si@tigger.cs.uwm.edu the subject line ``IJHCS
submission''. Otherwise, four copies of the paper can be sent by surface
mail to the street address given below.
Your submission should be prepared in single column, double-spaced format
using at least an 11 pt font. Sections should be numbered and references
should use (author, year) style. (Complete instructions for authors are
available at the IJHCS website, given below.)
Schedule
Submissions are due December 31, 1996
Decisions will be made by March 31, 1997
Production copy will be due May 31, 1997
Guest Editor
Susan McRoy, Computer Science
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
3200 North Cramer Street
Milwaukee, WI 53211
mcroy@cs.uwm.edu
(414) 229-6695 (phone)
(414) 229-6958 (fax)
http://www.cs.uwm.edu/cs/faculty/mcroy/
Additional Information
Additional information about the International Journal of Human Computer
Studies/Knowledge Acquisition and instructions for authors are available at:
http://ksi.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/IJHCS/
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Susan McRoy
Wed Oct 2 14:57:33 CDT 1996