About

This workshop will focus on collection and analysis of resources, novel research, and applications in both human-human and human-machine casual interaction.

A major distinction between different types of spoken interaction is whether the goal is ‘transactional’ or ‘interactional’. Transactional, or task-based, talk has short-term goals which are clearly defined and known to the participants – as in service encounters in shops or business meetings. Task-based conversations rely heavily on the transfer of linguistic or lexical information. In technology, most spoken dialogue systems have been task-based, designed under the constraints of Allen’s Practical Dialog Hypothesis for reasons of tractability (Allen et al., 2000), concentrating on practical activities such as travel planning.However, in real-life social talk there is often no obvious short term task to be accomplished through speech and the purpose of the interaction is better described as building and maintaining social bonds and transferring attitudinal or affective information – examples of this interactional talk include greetings, gossip, and social chat or small talk. A tenant’s short chat about the weather with the concierge of an apartment block is not intended to transfer important meteorological data but rather to build a relationship which may serve either of the participants in the future. Of course, most transactional encounters are peppered with social or interactional elements as the establishment and maintenance of friendly relationships contributes to task success.

There is increasing interest in modelling interactional talk for applications including social robotics, education, health and companionship. In order to successfully design and implement these applications, there is a need for greater understanding of the mechanics of social talk, particularly its multimodal features. This understanding relies on relevant language resources (corpora, analysis tools), analysis, and experimental technologies.

This workshop will provide a focal point for the growing research community on social talk to discuss available resources and ongoing work. We invite submissions on all aspects of social talk and its applications in technology.
Topics include but are not limited to:

• Corpora of social talk (human-human, human-machine)
• Annotations and analysis tools for social talk
• Analyses of features contributing to social talk – acoustic, visual, biometric…
• Demonstrations of systems modelling social talk

Identify, Describe and Share your LRs!

• Describing your LRs in the LRE Map is now a normal practice in the submission procedure of LREC (introduced in 2010 and adopted by other conferences). To continue the efforts initiated at LREC 2014 about “Sharing LRs” (data, tools, web-services, etc.), authors will have the possibility,  when submitting a paper, to upload LRs in a special LREC repository.  This effort of sharing LRs, linked to the LRE Map for their description, may become a new “regular” feature for conferences in our field, thus contributing to creating a common repository where everyone can deposit and share data.
• As scientific work requires accurate citations of referenced work so as to allow the community to understand the whole context and also replicate the experiments conducted by other researchers, LREC 2016 endorses the need to uniquely Identify LRs through the use of the International Standard Language Resource Number (ISLRN, www.islrn.org), a Persistent Unique Identifier to be assigned to each Language Resource. The assignment of ISLRNs to LRs cited in LREC papers  will be offered at submission time.

Important dates

• Deadline for submission of papers and abstracts: 14 February 2016
• Notification of acceptance: 10 March 2016
• Final version of accepted paper: 25 March 2016,  31 March 2016
• Workshop: 28 May 2016

Submissions

We will accept short research papers (maximum 4 pages) for oral or poster presentation, and welcome shorter abstracts (maximum 2 pages) for demonstrations of novel research and technological applications.

Submissions (in pdf form) should be made through the START V2 conference manager website at https://www.softconf.com/lrec2016/JustTalking/

Registration

Registration will be via the LREC website, which will also specify fees.

Organizing committee

Nick Campbell, Trinity College Dublin

Emer Gilmartin, Trinity College Dublin

Laurence Devillers, LIMSI, Paris

Sophie Rosset, LIMSI, Paris

Guillaume Dubuisson Duplessis, LIMSI, Paris