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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 (June 1997-December 1999), formally called "DISC Spoken Language Dialogue Systems and Components. Best practice in development and evaluation". The main goal of DISC is to identify current practice in the development and evaluation of Spoken Language Dialogue Systems (SLDSs) and their components, in order to come to a definition of best practice. DISC intends to contribute to the establishment of dialogue engineering guidelines to be used by different target groups, among others developers, deployers and customers.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES

The interest in SLDSs has increased enormously over the last few years: at present there is a large number of systems available many of them for commercial use; the number is growing rapidly and so is the variety of functionalities and domains of application. These developments have 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. We are aware that this is a delicate notion - what constitutes best practice depends on the kinds and complexity of tasks the SLDSs are to perform (e.g., with increasing task complexity, the need for improved dialogue control requires more sophisticated control of input speech and input language processing) and on a number of other constraints on SLDS development, having to do with resources available for system development, the constraints imposed by the different groups involved (e.g., developers' constraints, customer preferences and user group defined constraints), etc. So, we would like to take as a starting point a definition of best practice relative to factual constraints imposed on SLDS development.

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:

  1. best practice in the development and evaluation of SLDSs as a whole or
  2. best practice in the development and evaluation of one or more of the following system aspects,

    3. as well as of the interaction between them:
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 page, the reference of which is given below).

SUBMISSIONS

Submissions to the special issue should be in line with the NLE style sheet, which is obtainable via the NLE web page. 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. Alternatively, 6 hardcopies can be sent to the editorial address given below. The deadline for submission is September 1, 1999.

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.

DISC referees:

DISC Advisory Panel:

NLE referees

External referees:

IMPORTANT DATES

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

Tel.: +49 711 1211357 or 6574548
Fax: +49 711 1211366

FURTHER INFORMATION

Special issue web site: http://www.ims.uni-stuttgart.de/veranstaltungen/NLE_Special_Issue/

NLE web site: http://www.cup.cam.ac.uk/journals/nle/

DISC web site: http://www.elsnet.org/disc/
 

                                                                                                                                                                                Last modified: October, 1999.