This volume covers key topics in the field from a variety of leading researchers. In one volume, readers gain exposure to several perspectives in the areas of corpus annotation and analysis, dialogue system construction, theoretical perspectives on communicative intention, context-based generation, and modeling of discourse structure. Based on the 2nd SIGdial workshop on Discourse and Dialogue held in conjunction with Eurospeech 2001, it is of interest to researchers and practitioners in dialogue and discourse processing.
From the reviews: "Van Kuppevelt and Smitha (TM)s book offers a kind of archival proceedings for the Second SIGdial Workshop, which was held in 2001 in conjunction with Eurospeech. a ] the collection includes four invited new chapters, covering dialogue annotation, dialogue pragmatics, dialogue semantics, and dialogue system implementation. With all this new content, I wouldna (TM)t have hesitated to order the book for myself. a ] Van Kuppevelt and Smith have put together an inclusive, timely, and significant collection." (Matthew Stone, Computational Linguistics, Vol. 30 (4), 2004) "a ~Current and New Directions in Discourse and Dialoguea (TM) is a collection of sixteen papers. a ] The fact that the book gathers papers on several research areas related to discourse and dialogue makes it interesting not only for researchers working on specific areas, but also for those who would like to have a multidimensional view of the current dialogue and discourse oriented research by reading some representative articles." (Roser Morante, LINGUIST List, Issue 15, April, 2004)