Workshop 14
Communicative Agents: The use of natural language in embodied systems

Description

Enabling embodied systems to process natural language is a prerequisite for robust human oriented machine interaction. Natural language capabilities can help to make these systems more user friendly and effective. Natural language can be used in a flexible way so that little training is needed to instruct an agent and if speech processing is possible, the agent can even be instructed by a human without significant interruption of ongoing work. When desiging or using an autonomous agent it is often hard to understand what is going on inside the agent, what is relevant to the agent or what goals it tries to fulfill at a certain point of time. The capablity to generate a natural language description for the expression of the agent's internal states can support the system's design and functionality. Recent NLP technologies are hardly able to integrate non-linguistic data into their analysis. This leads to problems when trying to resolve references or interpreting elliptical expressions. Here the integration of situative data is essential. The same observations holds for the problem of language aquisition which is highly connected to perceiving the world and manipulating objects in it. Building complete systems, which sense, act and move in a dynamic (virtual or real) environment, offers a new framework in which solutions for these problems can be found.

Topics

The workshop aims to discuss communicative virtual and robotic agents which inhabit their particular virtual or real environments. The target audience for this workshop includes researchers and practitioners working on autonmous agents which display natural language capabilities. The workshop aims at providing an interdisciplinary forum for the exchange of new ideas and the discussion of future research directions. Topics of interest, but not limited to:

All aspects of NLP in agents, e.g. including speech processing, language understanding, language production and generation, text generation.
Evolution of language in embodied systems.
Human/Agent communication.
Inter agent communication.
NLP and social interaction: expression and verbalization of emotions and mental states
Integrating NLP and non-verbal forms of communication (e.g. gestures, body language)
Communicative agents in multi-user environments
Verbalizing internal concepts, goals or sensor data.
Integrating perception, action and natural language.
Theories and architectures for communicative agents.
Language and story-telling for narrative agents

The workshops aims to focus on discussions instead of having a "mini-conference". We suggest a one-day workshop which will comprise: a number of keynote talks a panel discussion with participants from different research areas, sessions with presentation of ongoing research in the field of communicative agents.

Programme committee

Jan-Torsten Milde, Universität Bielefeld (co-chair)
Kerstin Dautenhahn, University of Reading (co-chair)
Michael Beetz, Universität Bonn (co-chair)
Scott Prevost, FX Palo Alto Laboratory
James Lester, North Carolina State University
Lynne Hall, Univ. of Northumbria at Newcastle, UK
Patrick Doyle, Stanford University
Michael Mateas, CMU

Submission

Potential Participants are asked to submit electronically a 3-page extended abstract. From among the submissions a number of papers will be accepted for inclusion in the working notes. Participants who do not intend to contribute a paper for the working notes are asked to submit a one-page statement of interest. Depending on the quality of the selected papers a printed publication will be considered.

Contact

Submissions should be sent to the following address (electronic submissions prefered):

Dr. Jan-Torsten Milde,
Universität Bielefeld,
Fakultät für Linguistik und Literaturwissenschaft,
Universitätsstr. 25,
33501 Bielefeld, Germany,
email : milde@coli.uni-bielefeld.de
Tel.: (0)521 106 3678,
FAX: (0)521 106 2996

The following formats are acceptable: Four hardcopies (any A4 or US Letter format, max. 4 pp.) via post. Postcript or plain ASCII text only electronic submission to email : milde@coli.uni-bielefeld.de

Important dates

Friday, 12. Feb. 1999: extended submission deadline for extended 3 pages abstract
Friday, 19. Feb. 1999: notification of accepted papers
Tuesday, 23. Mar. 1999: deadline for final version
Saturday, 1st of May: Workshop in Seattle