FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS

CAFFEi-2008

Workshop on Computational aspects of affectual and emotional interaction
21-22 July 2008, Patras, Greece
http://caffei.iit.demokritos.gr/

The workshop is organized as part of the 18th European Conference on
Artificial Intelligence (ECAI 2008) and will be held in July 2008,
in Patras, Greece.

DEADLINE: 10 April 2008


Description and Topics
======================

A key enabling technology for next-generation artificial intelligence
agents for the service, domestic and entertainment market is natural
human-computer interaction. An AI agent that collaborates with humans
on a daily basis requires interactive skills that go beyond
present-day language technology: seamless and natural interaction
requires that the AI agent is able to correctly interpret (and to some
some extend also generate) linguistic signals that involve the
emotional state of the person they interact with, to behave
differently in different emotional contexts, to exhibit a different
personality in order to co-operate well with humans having different
personalities, and to correctly interpret humour or irony.

CAFFEi aims to bring together researchers working on the computational
modelling of emotions and affect, and especially their linguistic
realization, for the purposes of affectual human-computer interaction.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

 * affect and emotion recognition and generation, and particularly
   linguistic aspects thereof in text and speech;
 * personality trait modelling, and impact of computer personality
   traits and affect analysis on natural language generation and
   dialogue management;
 * evaluation of emotional impact of automatically generated text;
 * evaluation methods for emotion-sensitive parsing, generation, and
   dialogue management;
 * emotion text classification and affect text classification,
   used to evaluate or analyse human-computer or human-human
   interaction;
 * generating and recognizing humour and irony;
 * non-linguistic aspects of human-computer interaction, such as
   facial, gesture, and posture recognition, audio signal processing,
   avatars and virtual faces, etc., especially when used in
   conjunction to linguistic interaction modalities.


Invited Speaker
===============

Prof. Yorick Wilks, Univ. Sheffield (http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~yorick/)
will deliver a talk during the workshop.


Important Dates
===============

Apr 10: paper submission
May 10: notification
May 26: camera-ready copy and author registration
July 21 or 22: workshop date.


Participation and Paper Submission
==================================

The language of the conference will be English and we invite research
papers, work-in-progress papers, and position papers. All submissions
will be reviewed by an international programme committee.

Workshop proceedings will be prepared in paper and on CD-ROM. Each
participant will receive a hardcopy of CAFFEi proceedings, as well as
a CD with the proceedings of all ECAI'08 workshops. Workshop authors
will maintain the copyrights of their papers, but will be required to
sign a form allowing the local organizers to include their paper in
the workshop's proceedings. The possibility of a journal special issue
based on the workshop proceedings will be discussed during the
workshop.

Submissions should follow the style described in the ECAI-08
guidelines and be up to 10 pages in length, including title, author
names, abstract, and body. Please use PDF as file format. Latex styles
files implementing ECAI guidelines can be found here:
http://www.ece.upatras.gr/ecai2008/documents/ecai2008.zip

Paper submission details will be announced at a later date.


Registration
============

Workshop attendants are required to register to the main conference
and to the workshop. At least one author of each accepted workshop
paper is required to register by the camera-ready submission deadline.
Registration will be done through the ECAI-08 registration site,
http://www.ece.upatras.gr/ecai2008/registration.htm

CAFFEi authors will be able to register at early-registration dates,
regardless of the early-registration set for ECAI participants in
general.


Workshop Co-Chairs
==================

Stasinos Konstantopoulos, NCSR "Demokritos"
Vangelis Karkaletsis, NCSR "Demokritos"
Colin Matheson, University of Edinburgh
Jon Oberlander, University of Edinburgh


Organizing Committee
====================

Vangelis Karkaletsis, NCSR "Demokritos"
Stasinos Konstantopoulos, NCSR "Demokritos"
Vassiliki Rentoumi, NCSR "Demokritos"
Vassilis Spiliopoulos, NCSR "Demokritos"
Dimitris Vogiatzis, NCSR "Demokritos"


Program Committee
=================

Ion Androutsopoulos (Athens University of Ecomonics and Business, Greece)
Vangelis Karkaletsis (NCSR "Demokritos", Greece)
Stasinos Konstantopoulos (NCSR "Demokritos", Greece)
Valia Kordoni (DFKI GmbH and Saarland University, Germany)
Colin Matheson (University of Edinburgh, UK)
Rob Malouf (San Diego State University, USA)
Tony Mullen (Tsuda University, Japan)
Jon Oberlander (University of Edinburgh, UK)
Stelios Piperidis (Institute of Language and Speech Processing, Greece)
Graeme Ritchie (University of Aberdeen, UK)
Marina Sokolova (University of Montreal, Canada)
Yorick Wilks (University of Sheffield, UK)