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***SECOND CALL FOR PAPERS***
Natural Language Engineering
Special Issue on
Best Practice in Spoken Language Dialogue Systems Engineering
NLE SPECIAL ISSUE AS A DISC INITIATIVE
A special issue on Best Practice in Spoken Language Dialogue Systems
Engineering will be published by the journal of Natural Language
Engineering (NLE; Cambridge University Press) in the beginning of
2000. This issue is an initiative of the European Esprit project DISC.
BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES
The interest in Spoken Language Dialogue Systems (SLDSs) has increased
enormously over the last few years and has led to a situation in which
there is a great need, shared by developers, deployers and customers
alike, for effective guidelines, which will enable them to make
well-formed design and implementation decisions, in accordance with
broad consensus of what must be 'best practice' in this particular
engineering domain. The purpose of this special issue is to bring
together leading views on what might be considered to be best practice
in the development and evaluation of SLDSs.
THEME
In agreement with the main goal of DISC, the general theme for the
special issue is what could be taken as best practice in SLDS
engineering, given the availability of different technological options
with their inherent merits and limitations which are subject to
different constraints on system (component) realization.
We are interested in new, high quality papers which address, along the
lines of the objectives above, one or more of the following issues:
(i) best practice in the development and evaluation of SLDSs as a
whole or (ii) best practice in the development and evaluation of one
or more of the following system aspects: speech recognition, speech
synthesis, natural language understanding and generation, dialogue
management, human factors, and system integration.
All papers should fall within the scope of NLE, as described in the
instructions for contributors to the journal. This mainly implies that
the research views, comparative discussions, etc. described in the
papers must have a clear potential for practical application, in this
particular case meaning that they contribute to guidelines for SLDSs
best practice (see also the NLE web site, the reference of which is
given below).
SUBMISSIONS
The length of a paper should be 10-12 journal pages. Electronic
submissions should be sent as a postscript file by e-mail to the
(co-ordinating) special issue editor.
In order to get a better impression of the full range of submissions,
authors are asked to e-mail a short statement of their intention to
submit a paper to the co-ordinating special issue editor as soon as
possible.
REVIEW PROCEDURE
All papers, both those submitted by members of DISC and from outside
the project, will be double reviewed and triple reviewed if necessary.
The review committee consists of seven members of the DISC consortium,
one member of the DISC Advisory Panel, three members of the NLE
editorial board and a group of ten external referees. In case of a
very large number of submissions the review committee will be extended
accordingly.
Referees (not including DISC members) are:
James Allen (University of Rochester, USA)
Peter Bosch (IBM Scientific Centre Heidelberg, Germany)
Phil Cohen (OGIST, USA)
Robin Cooper (University of Goeteborg, Sweden)
James Glass (MIT, USA)
Julia Hirschberg (ATT Labs Research, USA)
Eduard Hovy (University of Southern California, USA)
Stephen Isard (University of Edinburgh, UK)
Lauri Karttunen (Rank Xerox Research, France)
Susann Luperfoy (IET, USA)
Karen Sparck Jones (Cambridge University, UK)
David Traum (University of Maryland, USA)
Marilyn Walker (ATT Labs Research, USA)
Yorick Wilks (University of Sheffield, UK)
IMPORTANT DATES
* Intention to Submit Due Date: as soon as possible
* Paper Due Date: September 1, 1999
* Revision Due Date: December 15, 1999
* Acceptance Date: January 2000
* Publication Date: February/March 2000
SPECIAL ISSUE EDITORS
The special issue editors are the IMS group participating in the DISC
project:
Jan van Kuppevelt (co-ordinating editor) kuppevelt@ims.uni-stuttgart.de
Ulrich Heid heid@ims.uni-stuttgart.de
Hans Kamp kamp@ims.uni-stuttgart.de
Editorial Address: NLE Special Issue, c/o Jan van Kuppevelt,
Institute for Computational Linguistics (IMS),
Azenbergstrasse 12, D-70174 Stuttgart - Germany.
FURTHER INFORMATION
Special issue web site: http://www.ims.uni-stuttgart.de/NLE_Special_Issue/
NLE web site: http://www.cup.org/journals/jnlscat/nle/nle.html
DISC web site: http://www.elsnet.org/disc/