09-10-Sep-2019, Leuven, Belgium
The 6th European and 9th Nordic Symposium on Multimodal Communication aims to provide a multidisciplinary forum for researchers from different disciplines who study multimodality in human communication as well as in human-computer interaction. The 2019 edition of the MMSYM symposium is organized by the MIDI research group (Multimodality, Interaction & Discourse) based at the Linguistics Department of the University of Leuven, Belgium.
The symposium follows up on a tradition established by the Swedish Symposia on Multimodal Communication held from 1997 until 2000, and continued by the Nordic Symposia on Multimodal Communication held from 2003 to 2012. Since 2013 the symposium has acquired a broader European dimension, with editions held in Malta, Estonia, Ireland, Denmark and Germany. This year the symposium will be held in Belgium for the first time.
The past ten years have witnessed a spectacular increase in research on multimodal communication from a variety of perspectives and (sub)disciplines, including (corpus) linguistics, conversation analysis, human-computer interaction research, and (critical) discourse analysis. This has not only led to a range of novel insights into the dynamics of embodied and situated communication (see e.g. Müller et al. 2013, 2014 for an overview), but has also been the catalyst for the development and implementation of methodological innovations, including the use of high-quality (including multi-angle) video recordings, the integration of input from motion capturing systems, biometric sensor systems and eye-tracking into a multimodal analysis pipeline, the exploration of (semi-)automatic annotation techniques for large-scale corpora, and the implementation of multimodal interaction in computer interfaces. Despite the rapid development of the fields involved, many questions still need to be resolved and new challenges emerge for research on multimodal communication. The MMSYM symposium aims to provide a forum for the discussion of these challenges.
Confirmed invited speakers:
Federico Rossano
University of California San Diego, Cognitive Science – Comparative Cognition Lab
Lindsay Ferrara
NTNU Trondheim, Department of Language & Literature
Topics:
The 2019 edition of the MMSYM Symposium zooms in on the theme of Multimodal Interaction, with a specific focus on corpus-based and experimental approaches to multimodal interaction in spoken and signed language. Recent corpus-linguistic as well as experimental work has provided evidence for multimodal patterns in face-to-face communication as the most basic form of human interaction. The MMSYM aims to provide a forum for this particular line of research.
Apart from this specific theme, the symposium is open for contributions covering all aspects of multimodal communication, including but not limited to:
Speech, gestures and signs in human communication
– Intercultural aspects of multimodal behaviour
– Multimodality aspects of language acquisition (both L1 and L2)
– Multimodal human computer interaction and conversational agents
– Multimodal systems for sign language users
– Multimodal health communication
– Multimodal communication, communication disorders and communication support
– Multimodal dialogue systems
– Multimodal corpora
– Sign language corpora
– Annotation schemes and tools for multimodal corpora
– Automatic recognition and interpretation of different modalities and their interaction
– Machine-learning techniques applied to multimodal data
– Evaluation methods for multimodal systems
Submission Guidelines:
We invite proposals for paper presentations of up to 500 words, including references. If relevant, links to multimedia clips that are made available online can be included in the abstract. All references to authors should be omitted for purposes of blind review.
Abstracts should be submitted as pdf files and sent to mmsym@kuleuven.be before 25 April 2019. Please make sure to add the following information in the body of that e-mail:
– names of authors
– title
– preferred presentation format (i.e. presentation or poster)
Important Dates:
– Deadline for abstract submissions: 25 April, 2019
– Notification of acceptance: 15 May, 2019
– Revised abstracts: 15 August, 2019
– Symposium dates: 9-10 September, 2019
