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1st Call for Papers

LREC 2008 Workshop on

"Multimodal corpora:
>From Models of Natural Interaction to Systems and Applications"


Tuesday, 27 May 2008
Marrakech (Morocco)
http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2008/

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DESCRIPTION

A 'Multimodal Corpus' targets the recording and annotation of several
communication modalities such as speech, hand gesture, facial
expression, body posture, etc. Theoretical issues are also addressed,
given their importance to the design of multimodal corpora.

This workshop continues the successful series of similar workshops at
LREC 00, 02, 04 and 06 also documented in a special issue of the
Journal of Language Resources and Evaluation due to come out in spring
2008. There is an increasing interest in multimodal communication and
multimodal corpora as visible by European Networks of Excellence and
integrated projects such as HUMAINE, SIMILAR, CHIL, AMI,
CALLAS. Furthermore, the success of recent conferences and workshops
dedicated to multimodal communication (ICMI, IVA, Gesture, PIT, Nordic
Symposia on Multimodal Communication, Embodied Language Processing)
and the creation of the Journal of Multimodal User Interfaces also
testifies to the growing interest in this area, and the general need
for data on multimodal behaviours.

The focus of this LREC'2008 workshop on multimodal corpora will be on
models of natural interaction and their contribution to the design of
multimodal systems and applications.

Topics to be addressed include, but are not limited to:
• Multimodal corpus collection activities (e.g. direction-giving
dialogues, emotional behaviour, human-avatar interaction, human-robot
interaction, etc.)

• Relations between modalities in natural (human) interaction and
in human-computer interaction

• Application of multimodal corpora to the design of multimodal and
multimedia systems

• Fully or semi-automatic multimodal annotation, using e.g. motion
capture and image processing, and its integration with manual
annotations

• Corpus-based design of systems that involve human-like modalities
either in input (Virtual Reality, motion capture, etc.) and output
(virtual characters)

• Multimodal interaction in specific scenarios, e.g. group
interaction in meetings

• Coding schemes for the annotation of multimodal corpora

• Evaluation and validation of multimodal annotations

• Methods, tools, and best practices for the acquisition, creation,
management, access, distribution, and use of multimedia and multimodal
corpora

• Interoperability between multimodal annotation tools (exchange
formats, conversion tools, standardization)

• Metadata descriptions of multimodal corpora

• Automated multimodal fusion and/or generation (e.g., coordinated
speech, gaze, gesture, facial expressions)

• Analysis methods tailored to multimodal corpora using
e.g. statistical measures or data mining
   
We expect the output of this workshop to be:

1) deeper understanding of theoretical issues and research questions
related to verbal and non-verbal communication that multimodal corpora
should address,

2) larger consensus on how such corpora should be built in order to
provide useful and usable answers to research questions,

3) shared knowledge of how the corpora are contributing to multimodal
and multimedia system design, and

4) an updated view of state-of-the-art research on multimodal corpora.

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IMPORTANT DATES

- February 10th: Deadline for submission (full paper)
- March 16th: Notification of acceptance
- March 30th: Camera ready version of papers
- May 27th: Workshop

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SUBMISSIONS

The workshop will consist primarily of paper presentations and
discussion/working sessions.  Submissions should be 4 pages long, must
be in English, and follow the submission guidelines from http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2008/
The .doc and .pdf file should be submitted via email to
MARTIN@LIMSI.FR and PATRIZIA@CST.DK

Demonstrations of multimodal corpora and related tools are encouraged
as well (a demonstration outline of 2 pages can be submitted).

As soon as possible, authors are encouraged to send to MARTIN@LIMSI.FR
and PATRIZIA@CST.DK a brief email indicating their intention to
participate, including their contact information and the topic they
intend to address in their submissions. Proceedings of the workshop
will be printed by the LREC Local Organising Committee.

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TIME SCHEDULE AND REGISTRATION FEE

The workshop will consist of a morning session and an afternoon
session.  There will be time for collective discussions.  For this
full-day Workshop, the registration fee will be specified on http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2008/

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ORGANISING COMMITTEE

MARTIN Jean-Claude, LIMSI-CNRS, France
PAGGIO Patrizia, Univ. of Copenhagen, Denmark
KIPP Michael, DFKI, Saarbrόcken, Germany
HEYLEN Dirk, Univ. Twente, The Netherlands

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