Symposium on Affective Language in Human and Machine
AISB 2008 Convention
1st-2nd April 2008 (dates to be confirmed)
University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, Scotland

NEW: PAPER SUBMISSION DEADLINE EXTENDED BY ONE WEEK!

http://www.csd.abdn.ac.uk/~cmellish/aisb08/

This symposium aims to combine advances in Affective Computing with
insights in Psychology and Cognition to shed light on the ways in which
affect is communicated by people in their written and spoken language
and might be appropriately communicated between people and machines.

Topics

We welcome submissions that describe original contributions or work in
progress on:

   1. Psychological and Cognitive studies of language with implications
for computer systems recognising or expressing affective state and
   2. Design or Implementation for affective language communication with
computer systems.

Although we have a particular interest in written language and speech,
we welcome contributions which combine these with other modalities, such
as gesture and facial expression.

Within this, possible topics are listed below, but this list is not
intended to be exhaustive.

    * Expressing Affective State
          o Analysis of language options/choices and of how those
            decisions might be made
          o Affective Language and Speech Generation
    * Recognising Affective State
          o Machine Learning approaches using information from text or speech
          o Sentiment analysis from text
          o Models of affective state inference (e.g. using Bayesian
            Networks) that take into account information from language
    * Influencing Affective State
          o How can language communication be used to influence a
            person's affective state?
          o Planning for the effects of communication on an addressee -
            e.g. for motivation, encouragement, discouragement, humour and
            entertainment
    * General Issues in Systems with Affective Language Communication
          o Emotions in vocal communication
          o Affective communication in Computer Mediated Communication
          o Dialogue and interaction
          o Lexical issues
          o Multimodality, Embodied Conversational Agents
          o Corpora and data markup to support empirical study
          o Culture and personality dependence
          o General architectures and implementation strategies
          o Social effects of affective language communication
            (persuasion, leadership, team cohesion...)
          o Opportunities and risks, ethical issues
          o Evaluation

Paper Format

Papers should be formatted in the ECAI format. LaTeX and Word templates
can be downloaded from the AISB08 download page. Two kinds of papers
will be considered:

    * Long papers of up to 8 pages in length, describing work that is
      relatively complete, and
    * Short papers of up to 4 pages in length, describing more
      speculative work or work that is in progress

The two types of paper will be allocated different amounts of time for
presentation at the symposium. These lengths are maximum lengths -
shorter papers will also be considered.

Note that student authors should append "(student)" to their name on the
first page of the originally submitted paper in order to be considered
for the AISB 2008 "best student paper" award.

Paper Submission

Papers should be submitted electronically as PDF files sent to
i.v.d.sluis at the address abdn.ac.uk by 12 noon GMT on 17th January
2008 . Each paper will be reviewed by at least two reviewers. Decisions
on acceptance and rejection will be communicated to the first named
authors of papers by 22nd February 2008 .

Authors of papers will be asked to sign a copyright declaration before
their papers can finally be accepted. This declaration is not exclusive
however: it gives AISB the right to publish the paper, but does not
prevent the author from also publishing it in other venues after.

All accepted papers will also have a poster space in the main hall at
the conference on the same day as their paper presentation, to give a
chance for questions and interaction between different symposia.

ORGANISATION

Symposium Chair

Chris Mellish, University of Aberdeen

Symposium Co-Chairs

Fiorella de Rosis, University of Bari
Isabella Poggi, Roma Tre University
Ielka van der Sluis, University of Aberdeen

PROGRAMME COMMITTEE:

Elisabeth Andre, University of Augsburg, Germany
Ruth Aylett, Heriot-Watt University, UK
Anton Batliner, Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany
Emanuela Magno Caldognetto, Padova, Italy
Valentina D'Urso, Padova, Italy
Laurence Devillers, LIMSI-CNRS, France
Floriana Grasso, University of Liverpool, UK
Dirk Heylen, University of Twente, Netherlands
Emiel Krahmer, University of Tilburg, Netherlands
Linda Moxey, University of Glasgow, UK
Nicolas Nicolov, Umbria Inc, USA
Jon Oberlander University of Edinburgh, UK
Helen Pain, University of Edinburgh, UK
Helmut Prendinger, Nat Inst of Informatics, Japan
Chris Reed, University of Dundee, UK
Oliviero Stock, ITC IRST, Italy
Carlo Strapparava, ITC IRST, Italy
Lyn Walker, University of Sheffield, UK