Dear colleagues,

It is our pleasure to invite you to participate in the

IWSDS'2012 Workshop on Spoken Dialog Systems

Towards a Natural Interaction with Robots, Knowbots and Smartphones

Following the success of IWSDS’2009 (Irsee, Germany), IWSDS’2010 (Gotemba Kogen Resort, Japan) and IWSDS’2011 (Granada, Spain), the Fourth International Workshop on Spoken Dialog Systems (IWSDS 2012) will be held in Paris (France) on November 28-30, 2012.

The IWSDS Workshop series provides an international forum for the presentation of research and applications and for lively discussions among researchers as well as industrialists, with a special interest to the practical implementation of Spoken Dialog Systems in everyday applications.

Spoken dialog is a matter of research investigations for many years. The first spoken language processing systems aimed at providing such an interaction between humans and machines. It slowly appeared that the problem was much more difficult than it was initially thought, as it involves many different components: speech recognition and understanding, prosody analysis, indirect speech acts, dialog handling, maintenance of the communication with verbal or non verbal events such as backchannels, speech generation and synthesis, multimodal fusion and fission, etc. Social interaction among humans is characterized by a continuous and dynamic exchange of information carrying signals. Producing and understanding these signals allow humans to communicate simultaneously on multiple levels. The ability to understand this information, and for that matter adapt generation to the goal of the communication and the characteristics of particular interlocutors, constitutes a significant aspect of natural interaction. It shows that it is actually very complex to develop simple, natural interaction means.

 Even if the research investigations kept on being conducted, it resulted in a shift of interest to easier tasks, such as voice command, voice dictation, or speech transcription. However, scientific achievements in language processing now results in the development of successful applications such as the IBM Watson, the Evi, Apple SIRI or Google Assistant for access to knowledge and interaction with smartphones, while the coming of domestic robots advocates for the development of powerful communication means with their human users and fellow robots.

We welcome you to the workshop.

Joseph Mariani (LIMSI & IMMI-CNRS) (Chair)
Laurence Devillers (LIMSI-CNRS & University Paris-Sorbonne 4)
Martine Garnier-Rizet (IMMI-CNRS)
Sophie Rosset (LIMSI-CNRS)

IWSDS 2012 Program Committee