[iva] [CFP] 2nd workshop on NLG for HRI

[Dimitra Gkatzia]

[apologies for cross-posting]

We are pleased to announce the 2nd workshop on Natural Language Generation
for Human-robot Interaction, which will take place on March 23rd, in
Cambridge (UK), at HRI 2020.

Website: https://hbuschme.github.io/nlg-hri-workshop-2020/

In Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), a primary goal is to develop robotic
agents that exhibit socially intelligent behaviour while interacting with
human partners. Despite the clear relationship between social intelligence
and fluent, flexible linguistic interaction, in practice, few interactive
robots employ anything beyond a simple, hard-coded process when generating
linguistic output. On the other hand, in Natural Language Generation (NLG),
the sub-area of computational linguistics dedicated to producing
high-quality natural-language output, increasingly sophisticated methods
have been developed for language production. However, while the interactive
settings and dynamic environments provided by HRI open up interesting
research problems in NLG, this connection has not been extensively
researched.

The first workshop in this series <https://purl.org/nlg-hri-workshop/2018>,
at the INLG 2018 conference, brought together members of the INLG and HRI
research communities for a day of discussion and confirmed that there is
mutual interest in exploring the possibilities of applying NLG techniques
to problems drawn from HRI. At the current workshop, at the International
Conference on Human–Robot Interaction, HRI 2020
<https://humanrobotinteraction.org/2020/>, we aim to bring those
communities together again, this time with a concrete goal: to define one
or more novel shared tasks, based on problems from HRI, that will allow NLG
researchers to develop and compare techniques for generation in this space,
and that will also allow HRI researchers to benefit from potentially
higher-quality linguistic output in their applications.

The workshop will also be of potential interest to researchers from other
fields that focus on ‘interaction’ such as spoken dialogue systems,
intelligent virtual agents, or intelligent user interfaces.

We invite participants to submit short position papers (opinion pieces,
challenge proposals, or current research; 2 pages + references) relevant to
the overall topic of the workshop. These will be presented in the first
session of the workshop. The second session will then be devoted to
discussion of potential shared tasks; the discussion of the shared task
will continue following the workshop, with the goal of submitting the task
to the *Shared Task track* of the INLG 2020 conference.
<https://github.com/hbuschme/nlg-hri-workshop-2020/blob/master/index.md#important-dates>Important
Dates:

   - Submission deadline: January 24, 2020
   - Notification of acceptance: January 31, 2020
   - Camera-ready papers due: February 29, 2020
   - Workshop: March 23, 2020 (morning session)

<https://github.com/hbuschme/nlg-hri-workshop-2020/blob/master/index.md#submission-website-httpseasychairorgmyconferenceconfnlg4hri>Submission
website: https://easychair.org/my/conference?conf=nlg4hri
<https://github.com/hbuschme/nlg-hri-workshop-2020/blob/master/index.md#organisers>
Organisers:

Hendrik Buschmeier, Mary Ellen Foster and Dimitra Gkatzia

-- 
Dr Dimitra Gkatzia - https://dimitragkatzia.wordpress.com/
Assistant Prof. of Computing @ Edinburgh Napier University
Twitter: https://twitter.com/gkatzia
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