Multimodal Conversational Interaction and Interfaces, Volume II

Dear Colleagues,

We are pleased to announce the call for papers for a second Special Issue on Multimodal Conversational Interaction and Interfaces. This is prompted by the successful first Issue and the positive responses to the research featured therein. We thank all of the authors and reviewers who participated in the first Issue. The published papers included work on predicting the next speakers in multi-party conversations, predicting meeting participation based on turn-taking dynamics, identifying salient utterances for automatic meeting summarization, analysis of collaboration in small-group interactions, work on developing conversational robots, and analysis of how humans interact with museum exhibits. 

In conversational interactions, communicative behaviors between participants include verbal information as well as nonverbal signals such as gestures, facial expressions, and gaze. The combination and co-occurrence of verbal and nonverbal behaviors make conversations rich in complexity, and patterns of multimodal information become even more complex when moving from dyads to multi-party groups. Research on multimodal conversational interaction has frequently used machine learning in order to shed light on the complex processes and patterns that are inherent to these group communicative interactions. Sample applications of these technologies include artificial conversational agents, intelligent meeting assistants, and enhanced computer-mediated conversations. 

The purpose of this second Special Issue is to solicit contributions from both theoretical and practical perspectives, and to envision the future directions of research on multimodal interaction and its application to multimodal conversational interfaces. We encourage authors to submit original research articles on topics including but not limited to the following:

• Theoretical and computational models that shed light on the process and characteristics of multimodal interaction;
• New data-driven methodologies for investigating multimodal interactional data;
• Interpretable machine-learning models for multimodal conversational interaction;
• Virtual agents and humanoid robots with multimodal and/or multiparty conversational functionality;
• Communication support systems that facilitate multimodal and/or multiparty conversation in computer-mediated communication;
• Tools and platforms that contribute to research on multimodal interaction and building novel multimodal conversational interfaces.

Prof. Dr. Gabriel Murray
Prof. Dr. Catharine Oertel
Prof. Dr. Yukiko I. Nakano
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Multimodal Technologies and Interaction is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• verbal and nonverbal information
• multiparty interaction
• interpretable machine learning for conversational interaction
• computational and statistical models
• conversational virtual agents
• communication robots
• multimodal interfaces for human-human communication
• social signal processing