This book derives from a workshop entitled 'Natural Dialogue and Interactive Stu dent Modeling', held October 17-20, 1992 in the Villa Cipressi in Varenna (Italy). The theme of the workshop focused on how approaches to natural dialogue and conversation contributed to the development ofa sophisticated dialogue component in intelligent tutoring systems. Researchers from the fields of educational technol ogy, dialogue research and user interface design were all invited to the workshop in order to ensure a broad knowledge base for the discussion of the main topic of the workshop. The workshop included a variety of presentations, most of which are presented in this book, as well as active discussions of a number of issues related to the main topic, such as: the intrinsic value of a dialogue component in an intelligent tutoring system verbal expressions (e.g., natural language) as a successful modality in a learning setting the application of results from other types of dialogue, such as information or task dialogues, in models of instructional dialogue the role of a teacher as an intermediary who provides motivation and support in learning as opposed to the role of a teacher as someone who just presents information. In the introductory chapter we have tried to combine these issues and link them to the papers that are presented in this volume."

The chapters in this book are revised, updated, and edited versions of 13 selected papers from the Second International Conference on Cooperative Multimodal Communication (CMC'98), held in Tilburg, The Netherlands, in 1998.This wasthesecondconferencein a series,ofwhichthe ?rstonewasheld inEindhoven,TheNetherlands,in1995.Threeofthesepaperswerepresentedby invitedspeakers;thosebyDoniaScott(co-authoredwithRichardPower),Steven Feiner (co-authored with Michele Zhou), and Oliviero Stock (co-authored with Carlo Strapparava and Massimo Zancanaro). The other ten were among the submitted papers that were accepted by the CMC'98 program committee. The editors contributed an introductory chapter to set the stage for the rest of the book. We thank the programcommittee for their excellent and timely feedback to the authors of the submitted papers, and at a later stage for advising on the contents of this volume and for providing additional suggestions for improving theselectedcontributions.Theprogramcommittee consistedofNicholasAsher, NormannBadler,DonBouwhuis,HarryBunt,WalthervonHahn,DieterHuber, Hans Kamp, John Lee, Joseph Mariani, Jean-Claude Martin, Mark Maybury, PaulMcKevitt, RobNederpelt, KeesvanOverveld,RayPerrault,Donia Scott, Jan Treur, Wolfgang Wahlster, Bonnie Webber, Kent Wittenburg, and Henk Zeevat. WethanktheRoyalDutchAcademyofSciences(KNAW)andtheOrga- zationforCooperationamongUniversitiesinBrabant(SOBU)fortheirgrants that supported the conference.

This book constitutes the strictly reviewed post-workshop documentation of the First International Conference on Cooperative Multimodal Communication held in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, in 1995.
The volume presents an introductory survey and carefully re vised and updated full versions of three invited contributions and 14 papers selected for inclusion in the book after intensive reviewing. Among the issues addressed are intelligent multimedia retrieval, cooperative conversation, agent system communication, multimodal maps, multimodal plan presentation, multimodal user interfaces, multimodal dialog, and various systems for multimodal HCI.

This volume in the NATO Special Programme on Advanced Educational Technology addresses fundamental principles in the design of a dialogue component in intelligent tutoring systems. The purpose of the book is to link fundamental issues of communication and interaction to the more restricted domain of instructional dialogue. The papers are grouped into parts on: theoretical issues in instructional dialogue; theory into practice - interaction in learning environments; natural dialogue and interaction theory; and feedback and control in human-machine communication. The book originates from a NATO Advanced Research Workshop held in Italy in 1992 and the authors are leading researchers in educational technology, dialogue research and user-interface design.