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Status-colloquium on Theories of Dialogue

17. - 19. November 2005

Universität Bielefeld

We are in the happy position to be able to organize the Status-colloquium on Theories of Dialogue at the Faculty for Linguistics and Literary Studies, Bielefeld University, in November 2005. It will be supported by our faculty and the SFB 360, “Situated Artificial Communicators”.

It seems to us that dialogue theory has reached a sufficiently mature state of development to foster such a colloquium: There have been works focusing on dialogue within psycholinguistics which have received considerable attention, an outstanding monograph covering discourse and dialogue was published and has already gained wide currency. In addition, rumor has it that other dialogue addicts are working on monographs of their respective approaches to dialogue. During the last years there also has been many a project on applications of dialogue theories in linguistic and AI domains at various European universities. Finally, the series of dialogue colloquia (from Mundial ’97 to Catalog ’04), which are a really inspiring forum for dialogue research has been going on for some years by now. So we might take stock.

The Statuscolloquium is exclusively devoted to work on current theories of dialogue, therefore it does not compete with other events in the field.

The idea is to get contributions for the Statuscolloquium which focus on the central empirical and theoretical assumptions of the respective dialogue theories proposed, inform about the stage of their development, the problems currently at issue and their future perspectives. Thereby we hope to get an authorised overview concerning the existing major approaches to dialogue theory. The effect of this enterprise could be two-fold at least: On the one hand, we could have (hopefully lively and interesting) discussions in between the different approaches about fruitful routes to take, benchmark problems to solve etc. and thus work on strengthening the dialogue movement, on the other hand it would be worthwhile to present the state of the art to a wider public in AI, linguistics and philosophy and to edit a volume containing the worked out talks. It is fairly obvious that at the time being such a volume could easily acquire the status of a representative hand-book, which, as we see it, would be in the interest of all of us.