Current and New Directions in Discourse and Dialogue.

The origins of this book arise from the highly successful second SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue that was held in September 2001 in con­ junction with Eurospeech 2001. The original workshop proceedings consisted of 29 papers selected from 57 submissions, an exceptionally high number of submissions for a two day workshop. This book includes extended versions of 12 papers originally presented at the workshop. In addition, 4 other invited papers on major themes in discourse and dialogue research are included. There are three main themes addressed by the papers in this collection: (1) corpus annotation and analysis; (2) method­ ologies for construction of dialogue systems; and (3) perspectives on various key theoretical issues including communicative intention, context-based gen­ eration, and modeling of discourse structure. However, because of the very nature of discourse and dialogue research that often requires researchers to tackle several issues in one piece of work, we have chosen to order the papers alphabetically by author rather than try to create artificial thematic sections. We believe this collection provides a concise yet reasonably comprehensive snapshot of major research themes in discourse and dialogue. We hope that readers will benefit greatly from this collection.

From the reviews:

"Van Kuppevelt and Smitha (TM)s book offers a kind of archival proceedings for the Second SIGdial Workshop, which was held in 2001 in conjunction with Eurospeech. a ] the collection includes four invited new chapters, covering dialogue annotation, dialogue pragmatics, dialogue semantics, and dialogue system implementation. With all this new content, I wouldna (TM)t have hesitated to order the book for myself. a ] Van Kuppevelt and Smith have put together an inclusive, timely, and significant collection." (Matthew Stone, Computational Linguistics, Vol. 30 (4), 2004)

"a ~Current and New Directions in Discourse and Dialoguea (TM) is a collection of sixteen papers. a ] The fact that the book gathers papers on several research areas related to discourse and dialogue makes it interesting not only for researchers working on specific areas, but also for those who would like to have a multidimensional view of the current dialogue and discourse oriented research by reading some representative articles." (Roser Morante, LINGUIST List, Issue 15, April, 2004)