A dialogue is a written, spoken or otherwise expressed conversational exchange between two or more people or technical systems. While early dialogue systems, e.g. for automatic telephone answering machines, had some shortcomings, i.e. restricted vocabulary and grammar and lack of prosodic elements, recent approaches focus on natural and multi-modal human-machine interaction techniques to archive high user acceptance. This, e.g., enables trans-modal conversation, where the semantic meaning is represented by two different modalities, i.e. complementing speech and gesture: saying “give me that” while pointing to a particular object. Furthermore, a common representation format for multimodal human communication is focus of ongoing research activities.

To enable a mostly natural and intuitive human-machine-interaction, several complex communication and interaction principles between people and computers have to be realized, covering the realization and evaluation of interactive machine and computing systems. This covers knowledge representation, cognitive systems, displaying techniques and other ergonomic interfaces, signal processing, pattern recognition, human factors, haptics and (social) robotics, just to name a few.

The workshop “Dialog Systems that think along – do they really understand me?” will be held during the 25th German Conference on Artificial intelligence (KI 2012) in Saarbrücken, Germany. Participants from research and industry will present their latest work in the fields of human-machine interaction for assistive systems and cognitive systems for social robots.