The Interdisciplinary Workshop on Feedback Behaviors in Dialog will be held September 7-8, 2012.

Feedback skills are important for people (or machines) wishing to be able to function as supportive, cooperative listeners. The production and comprehension of back-channels and related phenomena, including response tokens, reactive tokens, minimal responses, continuers and acknowledgments, are also of scientific interest, as possibly the most accessible example of the real-time responsiveness that underpins many successful interpersonal interactions. This workshop will provide a venue for an interdisciplinary examination of these phenomena and feedback behaviors in dialog.

The scope of the workshop includes all topics related to feedback in dialog:

- phonetic, prosodic and multi-modal properties of back-channels and related phenomena
- cues for feedback and contexts of feedback
- language-specific findings and cross-cultural comparisons
- dimensions of variation in feedback behavior among speakers
- other empirical results about back-channels and related phenomena
- innovative or more efficient research methods
- possible standard evaluation metrics for models of feedback behavior
- applications, including for virtual agents and robots, for behavior analysis, for second-language education and communication training, for voice user interfaces and so on
- implications of findings about feedback, including for models of dialog, action timing, adaptation, social cognition, mutual influence, cognitive and language processes, coordination, and interpersonal interaction
- identification of unresolved research questions about feedback in dialog
- other related topics

Potential participants should submit one of the following:

- a paper presenting original research (2 to 4 pages)
- a description of a system to demonstrate at the workshop (1 to 4 pages)
- a position statement on needs or directions for future work (1 to 2 pages)
- a statement of interest, including for example a biographical sketch, abstracts of and links to previously published work, and/or a few questions or issues suggested for discussion at the workshop

Papers, system descriptions, and position statements should be in Interspeech format. Submissions may be sent to feedbackworkshop2012@gmail.com.