MOBILE AND ADAPTIVE CONVERSATIONAL INTERFACES

A Special Issue of ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI)

Special issue editors: Sharon Oviatt and Stephanie Seneff

Deadline for Submissions (extended): 01 September, 2002.

Conversational interfaces represent a new direction and challenge for the interface design community. While past spoken language interfaces have focused on command and control and dictation-style interaction, research now is attempting to design interfaces that can process increasingly more spontaneous, interactive and natural conversational spoken language. As part of this trend, some newer interfaces are beginning to recognize speech in combination with related input modalities (e.g., touch, gesture, gaze, facial expressions) and sensors (e.g., location, proximity). Multimodal or sensor-enhanced conversational interfaces aim to expand the interface's flexibility and expressive power, while also supporting the system's capacity to process information more reliably and transparently when users are mobile in adverse field environments. Broadly defined, conversational interfaces also encompass those designed to support the transmission of interpersonal or human-computer conversation, as in telephony systems, without necessarily aiming to recognize a user's spoken language or other input. For example, innovative cell phone interfaces may be designed to manage conversation in public places, permit multimodal interaction, or enhance user safety while mobile. All of these types of conversational interface focus on supporting users as they engage in communication-intensive tasks, whether conversation is recognized or simply transmitted via the interface, and would be appropriate submissions for this special issue. Submissions on interfaces for transmitting conversation should specifically address mobile and adaptive processing issues.

Another key trend in conversational interface design is the need for tailoring to meet the needs and usage patterns of individual users, especially while mobile. Successful personalization of conversational interfaces and system processing requires new interfaces, techniques, and architectures that are capable of strategically adapting processing to a particular user, task or activity, dialogue, input modes, and environmental context. Research demonstrating advances in this area, which often represent the intersection of human-computer interaction and artificial intelligence, also are welcome for this special issue. For example, this may include research aimed at adapting system processing to accommodate an individual user's cognitive load, or to direct and adapt services to accommodate a user's current location and availability for interruption. In addition, modeling of the adaptive patterns that occur naturally during communication between interlocutors, for example between a user and an animated character that responds with text-to-speech and nonverbal behavior, can provide an empirical foundation for developing effective adaptive strategies used in next-generation conversational systems.

Submissions on conversational interface design in any of the above areas may focus on design, empirical, or system implementation issues, as long as they make an original, high quality contribution to the understanding and realization of effective conversational systems. Since advances on these topics ideally require cross-fertilization of perspectives and techniques represented by different research areas, including human-computer interaction, speech and multimodal technologies, telecommunications, ubiquitous and mobile, and artificial intelligence techniques, submissions are especially welcome that span or "bridge" these and related areas. Surveys or reviews also will be considered. In all cases, however, submissions to this TOCHI special issue should be written for a generalist HCI audience, including definition of terms, explanatory background, and HCI-relevant literature on the main research topic addressed.

Further information regarding guidelines for preparing and formatting manuscripts and general TOCHI submission procedures are available at: <http://www.acm.org/tochi/>. Please indicate in your cover letter that your manuscript is being submitted to the special issue on "Mobile and Adaptive Conversational Interfaces." The deadline for receiving submissions is June 1, 2002. All contributions will be peer reviewed to the usual standard of TOCHI. For further information or to discuss a possible contribution, please contact Sharon Oviatt (oviatt@cse.ogi.edu).

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Last Updated: 7/29/02; 9:29:11 AM