SIGDIAL 2016 CONFERENCE 17th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest
Group on Discourse and Dialogue, the University of Southern California
Institute for Creative Technologies, Los Angeles, CA, USA. September
13-15, 2016 (just after INTERSPEECH)
Submission Deadline: 22 May, 2016
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CALL FOR PAPERS
The SIGDIAL venue provides a regular forum for the presentation of
cutting edge research in discourse and dialogue to both academic and
industry researchers. Continuing with a series of successful sixteen
previous meetings, this conference spans the research interest area of
discourse and dialogue. The conference is sponsored by the SIGDIAL
organization, which serves as the Special Interest Group in discourse
and dialogue for both ACL and ISCA. SIGDIAL 2016 will be co-located
with INTERSPEECH 2016 (http://interspeech2016.org/) as a satellite
event, and also with YRRSDS 2016 (http://www.yrrsds.org/), the Young
Researchers' Roundtable on Spoken Dialog Systems.
TOPICS OF INTEREST
We welcome formal, corpus-based, implementation, experimental, or
analytical work on discourse and dialogue including, but not
restricted to, the following themes:
1. Discourse Processing and Dialogue Systems
Discourse semantic and pragmatic issues in NLP applications such as
text summarization, question answering, and information retrieval.
Spoken, multi-modal, and text/web based dialogue systems, their
components, evaluation and applications.
2. Corpora, Tools and Methodology
Corpus-based and experimental work on discourse and spoken, text-based
and multi-modal dialogue, including supporting topics such as
annotation tools and schemes, and corpora.
3. Pragmatic and/or Semantic Modeling
The pragmatics and/or semantics of discourse and dialogue (i.e. beyond
a single sentence).
SUBMISSIONS
The program committee welcomes the submission of long papers, short
papers and demo descriptions. Papers submitted as long papers may be
accepted as long papers for oral presentation, long papers for poster
presentation, or short papers for poster presentation. Short papers
will be presented as posters.
- Long papers must be no longer than eight pages, including title,
text, figures and tables. An unlimited number of pages are allowed
for references. Two additional pages are allowed for example
discourses or dialogues and algorithms.
- Short papers should be no longer than four pages including title,
text, figures and tables. An unlimited number of pages are allowed
for references.
- Demo descriptions should be no longer than four pages including
title, text, examples, figures, tables and references.
Authors are encouraged to also submit additional accompanying
materials such as corpora (or corpus examples), demo code, videos,
sound files, etc.
Please use the official ACL style files: http://acl2016.org/files/acl2016.zip
Papers that have been or will be submitted to other meetings or
publications must provide this information (see submission
format). SIGDIAL 2016 cannot accept for publication or presentation
work that will be (or has been) published elsewhere. Any questions
regarding submissions can be sent to program-chairs<at>sigdial.org.
INVITED SPEAKERS
- Susan Brennan, NSF/Stony Brook
http://www.psychology.sunysb.edu/sbrennan-/
- Louis-Philippe Morency, CMU
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~morency/
SPECIAL SESSION
The Future Directions of Dialogue-Based Intelligent Personal Assistants
Organizers:
- Yoichi Matsuyama (CMU)
- Alexandros Papangelis (Toshiba Cambridge Research Laboratory)
Today is the era of intelligent personal assistants. All the major
tech giants have introduced personal assistants as the front end of
their services, including Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana,
Facebook's M, and Amazon's Alexa. Several of these companies have also
released bot toolkits so that other smaller companies can join the
fray. However, while the quality of conversational interactions with
intelligent personal assistants is crucial for their success in both
business and personal applications, fundamental problems, such as
discourse processing, computational pragmatics, user modeling, and
collecting and annotating adequate real data, remain
unsolved. Furthermore, the intelligent personal assistants of tomorrow
raise a whole set of new technical problems.
The SIGDIAL special session "The Future of Dialogue-Based Intelligent
Personal Assistants" will consist of talks and posters that introduce
and evaluate solutions to dialogue system challenges preventing the
development of effective and compelling intelligent personal
assistants. Researchers from both academia and industry are welcome. A
panel of notable academic and industry players will lead to insights
on future directions.
The special session will last 2.5 hours and will consist of long/short
paper presentations, poster presentations, and a panel discussion
entitled "The Future Directions of Dialogue Based Intelligent Personal
Assistants". For more information, please visit the special session
website: http://articulab.hcii.cs.cmu.edu/sigdial2016/
The papers submitted to the special session are handled by special
session organizers, but for the submitted papers to be in the SIGDIAL
proceedings, they have to undergo the same review process as regular
papers.
MENTORING
Submissions with innovative core ideas that may be in need of language
(English) or organizational assistance will be flagged for "mentoring"
and accepted with recommendation to revise with a mentor. An
experienced mentor who has previously published in the SIGDIAL venue
will then help the authors of these flagged papers prepare their
submissions for publication. Any questions about this initiative can
be addressed to the mentoring chair Pierre Lison (University of Oslo,
Norway plison@ifi.uio.no).
BEST PAPER AWARDS
In order to recognize significant advancements in dialog/discourse
science and technology, SIGDIAL will recognize BEST PAPER AWARDs. All
papers at the conference are eligible for the best paper awards. A
selection committee consisting of prominent researchers in the fields
of interest will select the recipients of the awards.
IMPORTANT DATES
Submission: 22 May, 2016
Notification of acceptance: 30 Jun, 2016
Final submission: 21 Jul, 2016
Conference: 13-15 Sept, 2016
WEBSITES
Conference website: http://www.sigdial.org/workshops/conference17
Submission link: To be announced
SIGdial organization website: http://www.sigdial.org
Co-located Conference website:
INTERSPEECH 2016 http://interspeech2016.org/
ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
For any questions, please contact the appropriate members of the
organizing committee.
General Chairs
Raquel Fernandez, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands
Wolfgang Minker, Ulm University, Germany
general-chairs<at>sigdial.org
Program Chairs
Giuseppe Carenini, The University of British Columbia, Canada
Ryuichiro Higashinaka, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation, Japan
program-chairs<at>sigdial.org
Local Chairs
Ron Artstein, University of Southern California, USA
Alesia Gainer, University of Southern California, USA
local-organizers<at>sigdial.org
Mentoring Chair
Pierre Lison, University of Oslo, Norway
mentoring<at>sigdial.org
Sponsorships Chair
Ethan Selfridge, Interactions Corporation, USA
sponsor-chair<at>sigdial.org
SIGdial President
Amanda Stent, Yahoo! Inc., USA
SIGdial Vice President
Jason Williams, Microsoft Research, USA
SIGdial Secretary/Treasurer
Kristiina Jokinen, University of Helsinki, Finland
To contact SIGdial President, vice presidents, and secretary/treasurer, send an
email to exec<at>sigdial.org.