SIGDIAL
Laila Dybkj?r

SIGdial is the ACL and ISCA Special Interest Group on Discourse and
Dialogue which was formed in November 1997. This report covers the period
from July 2000 to June 2001.


PEOPLE:

SIGdial is for the moment being run by the following team: President:
Laila Dybkjær; Vice President: David Traum; Secretary: Barbara di
Eugenio; Science Advisory Committee: Jennifer Chu-Carroll, Morena
Danieli, Diane Litman, Akira Shimazu, Michael Strube, Jan van Kuppevelt;
Information Officer: Pamela Jordan with contributions from Kristiina
Jokinen; AAAI Liaison: Diane Litman, ACL Student Liaison: Weiqun Xu; CHI
Liaison: Nils Dahlbäck; ICSLP/ISCA Liaison: Julia Hirschberg; Mailing
list maintenance: Laurent Romary.

SIGdial has more than 200 members registered on its membership web page.
Since September 2000 almost 100 members have registered on the web.

Elections are held every second year and the next elections will take
place this summer/autumn.


WORKSHOP ENDORSEMENT

During the past year several workshops with strong relations to the
SIGdial field of interest have been endorsed by SIGdial. The workshops
endorsed by SIGdial which have taken place within the reported period
include:

July 3-5, 2000: Third Workshop on Human-Computer Conversation (Bellagio,
Italy).

October 7-8, 2000: ACL2000: 1st SigDial Workshop on Discourse and
Dialogue with theme session on Principles For Dialogue System Evaluation
(Hong Kong).

November 3-5, 2000: AAAI Fall Symposium, Building Dialogue Systems for
Tutorial Applications (North Falmouth, MA, USA).

June 4 2001: NAACL: Workshop on Adaptation in Dialogue Systems
(Pittsburgh, USA).

June 14-16 2001: BI-DIALOG 2001 (Fifth Workshop on the Semantics and
Pragmatics of Dialogue) (Bielefeld, Germany).

Workshops which have been endorsed by SIGdial but haven’t been held yet
include:

July 6-7 2001: ACL-EACL Workshop on Evaluation for Language and Dialogue
Systems (Toulouse, France).

August 5 2001: 2nd IJCAI Workshop on Knowledge And Reasoning In Practical
Dialogue Systems (Seattle, USA).

August 20-24 2001: ESSLLI Workshop: Information Stucture, Discourse
Structure and Discourse Semantics (Helsinki Finland).

October 22-24 2001: ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop on: Prosody in
Speech Recognition and Understanding (Red Bank, USA).

June 17-21, 2002: ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop on Spoken Dialogue
in Mobile Environments (Kloster Irsee, Germany).


SIGDIAL WORKSHOP SERIES

To strengthen collaboration and bring members from the SIGdial community
together the first SIGdial workshop on Discourse and Dialogue was held on
7-8 October 2000 in Hong Kong in conjunction with ACL’2000. The workshop
was a successful event with about 35 participants, 18 paper
presentations, and lively discussions after each presentation. The online
workshop proceedings are available at
http://www.sigdial.org/sigdialworkshop/proceedings/. Hardcopies can be
bought via ACL.

At the first workshop there was strong support for organising a second
SIGdial workshop already in 2001. This is now happening. The second
SIGdial workshop will take place on 1-2 September in Aalborg, Denmark,
right before Eurospeech’2001. Information on SIGdial workshops can be
found at http://www.sigdial.org/workshops.html


WEB

SIGdial has a web site at http://www.sigdial.org. The web site is hosted
by NISLab. Some pages are maintained by a particular person, such as the
information officer, while other pages are intended to be maintained by
the membership collectively. For instance, the web site enables members
to easily update their personal information in the membership database.
Also a resource page has been established which members are encouraged to
collectively maintain by adding references to resources they are aware of
and which may be of interest to the SIGdial community. This page includes
references to e.g. coding schemes, language resources, spoken dialogue
systems, and tools.


OTHER ACTIVITIES

Since autumn 2000 SIGdial has a collaboration with Elsnet, the European
Language and Speech Network. Elsnet has a newsletter, Elsnews, and Elsnet
has generously offered one page in each issue of Elsnews for SIGdial
purposes. SIGdial contributions in Elsnews can be found in issue 9.3 and
onwards. Elsnews can be freely downloaded in pdf format from
http://www.elsnet.org/elsnews.html.

Since May 2001 SIGdial has had two parent organisations, i.e. ACL (the
Association for Computational Linguistics) and ISCA (the International
Speech Communication Association). People from the two communities of ACL
and ISCA have often been working on discourse and dialogue from different
perspectives and with different purposes. Bringing those people together
in SIGdial is hoped to foster fruitful discussions and new activities.

SIGdial is also actively involved in promoting outreach to other groups
with overlapping interest. For example the Bi-Dialog workshop on
semantics and pragmatics of dialogue was endorsed by both SIGdial and
SigSem, and the upcoming workshop on spoken dialogue in mobile
environments is endorsed by both SIGdial and SIGMedia.