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Details of Grant 

EPSRC Reference: EP/D033691/1
Title: Workwork on spatial language and dialogue
Principal Investigator: Coventry, Professor K
Other Investigators:
Researcher Co-Investigators:
Project Partners:
University of Bremen
Department: Sch of Life Sciences
Organisation: Northumbria, University of
Scheme: Standard Research (Pre-FEC)
Starts: 25 November 2005 Ends: 24 May 2006 Value (£): 4,761
EPSRC Research Topic Classifications:
Human Communication in ICT
EPSRC Industrial Sector Classifications:
Creative Industries
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Summary on Grant Application Form
Talking about where objects are located in world is an essential skill required for any competent speaker of a language (e.g., Where is the coffee? The coffee is in the cup). Consequently any natural language interface needs to be able to describe locations of objects using natural language also. Recently work on spatial language has been a hive of activity, evidenced by a large number of books and papers on this topic. However, almost all of this work has focussed on spatial language in monologue settings. Additionally, much of the work in this literature often involves testing under somewhat artificial conditions without clearly defined communicative goals. For example, participants in experiments are typically asked to rate how appropriate sentences are to describe pictures or are asked to respond true or false using sentence-picture verification tasks, etc. (see Coventry & Garrod, 2004 for a comprehensive review, and for a snapshot of recent activity in the field more generally). Yet most language occurs in dialogue situations, and therefore how participants align themselves with one another when talking about the spatial world is of central importance (see for example, Clark, 1996; Pickering & Garrod, 2004). Furthermore, recent approaches to robot-robot and human-robot interaction have begun to treat concepts and language as emergent properties of interaction between agents (see Steels, 2003 for a recent review). Hence, the current zeitgeist in both language research and robotics demands an integrated examination of spatial language in dialogue settings. The Workshop on Spatial Language and Dialogue will do precisely this, bringing together leading researchers working on spatial language and dialogue in order to share what is known about spatial language and dialogue and to facilitate moving the literature in this direction. Submissions for the workshop will include papers from those working on spatial language and dialogue, human-human dialogue, human-robot dialogue and robot-robot dialogue. The resulting edited book, to be published by Oxford University Press, is likely to have a large impact on spatial language research, but also more generally in the areas of linguistics, psycholinguistics, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and computing.
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