SocialCom 2012 workshop on: Exploring Stances in Interactions:
Conceptual and Practical Issues in Social Signal Processing Research

http://hmi.ewi.utwente.nl/socialcom2012stance/

To be held as part of the Fourth ASE/IEEE International Conference on Social Computing (SocialCom 2012) Amsterdam (The Netherlands), September 3-6, 2012. (http://www.asesite.org/conferences/socialcom/2012)

Workshop date: September 3, 2012

Location: Amsterdam (The Netherlands)

Submission deadline: 28 May 2012

(NEW) Please notice invited Speaker: Scott Kiesling (University of Pittsburgh)
http://hmi.ewi.utwente.nl/socialcom2012stance/speakers.html

Contact: questions or submission/participation interest, please send an email to [email protected]

Goals and Topics

The ability to understand stances adopted by participants during interactions is an important aspect of human social intelligence. Stances can be seen as expressions of attitudes, feelings, judgments, or evaluations concerning the propositional content of a message, (i.e., statements, assertions, or verbal and non-verbal behaviors which express judgments or opinions) that sometimes have an affective component. One can say, for example, that someone is in a calm, assertive or uncertain stance. They contrast with personality traits and emotions, in that stances are rather stable but not permanent states, they are adopted rather than elicited, they are addressed to someone or something, and are co-created by the participants during interaction. Furthermore, stance expressions are multimodal in nature and can involve linguistic, paralinguistic, facial and bodily behavior. Understanding stances during interactions allows humans to have fluent and successful conversations. One of the core aims of social signal processing (SSP) is to carry this human skill over to machines.

Allowing machines such as embodied conversational agents (ECAs) to have these human-like interactions with humans involves automatically recognizing and synthesizing stance behavior. The recognition of a user’s stances during interaction will enable an ECA to identify how the user’s message is to be perceived and understood, and consequently, how the interaction can be adapted to this interpretation. The synthesis of an ECA’s stances improves the interaction in terms of, for example, the ECA’s believability and the atmosphere of the interaction.

Hence, this workshop concentrates on studies of multimodal expressions of stances in both human-human and human-machine interaction, and on the automatic processing of stances. We aim to bring together researchers from various disciplines (e.g., phonetics, linguistics, psychology, computer science) to foster multidisciplinary discussions on stances in interaction.

We invite contributions on research related to (but by no means limited to) the following topics:

• conceptual modeling of stance in interaction
• development of stance-rich corpora
• annotation of stance-related expressions
• linguistic, paralinguistic, facial and bodily cues of stance-taking
• automatic recognition of stance-related cues or behavior
• automatic generation of stance-related behavior
• co-creation (alignment) of stances in interaction

Important dates:

Deadline submission papers 28 May 2012
Notification of acceptance 2 July 2012
Camera ready paper 16 July 2012

Paper submission:

• Paper format follows the SocialCom 2012 guidelines for short papers (maximum of 6 pages, IEEE guidelines for conference proceedings, download the templates here: http://www.ieee.org/conferences_events/conferences/publishing/templates.html)
• Papers (pdf format) should be submitted to: [email protected] and will undergo peer review by at least 2 reviewers.
• Reviews will be based on fullpaper submission.
• Papers will be presented as oral or poster depending on the reviews and the overall number of acceptable submissions.
• The workshop papers will be included in the proceedings of the main conference in a separate volume.

Program Committee:

Jens Allwood, University of Göteberg, Sweden
Elisabeth Ahlsén, University of Göteberg, Sweden
Timothy Bickmore, Northeastern University, USA
Roddie Cowie, Queen’s University Belfast, UK
Hatice Gunes, Queen Mary University of London, UK
Dirk Heylen, University of Twente, The Netherlands
Eva Krumhuber, Jacobs University Bremen, Germany
Gary McKeown, Queen’s University Belfast, UK
Catherine Pelachaud, LTCI, Télécom ParisTech, France
Isabella Poggi, Roma Tre University, Italy
Ken Prepin, CNRS LTCI, Télécom ParisTech, France
Bjorn Schuller, Tech. University Munich, Germany

Workshop organisers:

Paul Brunet, Queen’s University Belfast, UK
Marcela Charfuelan, DFKI, Germany
Magalie Ochs, CNRS LTCI, Télécom ParisTech, France
Khiet Truong, University of Twente, The Netherlands

Contact:
[email protected]

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