2019Q3 Reports: SIGDIAL
SIGdial annual report to ACL for 2018-2019
Gabriel Skantze, SIGdial President
SIGdial is the ACL and ISCA Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialog. More information about SIGdial can be found on our website: http://www.sigdial.org. Users can also become members from the website; members are added to a low-volume, moderated mailing list (mainly conference and job announcements). SIGdial is fully compliant with ACL and ISCA guidelines for SIGs, and currently has 581 members.
Our most recent regular election was held in early 2019, and elected Gabriel Skantze (President), Mikio Nakano (Vice President), Vikram Ramanarayanan (Secretary) and Ethan Selfridge (Treasurer). For the Scientific Advisory Board, Ryuichiro Higashinaka, Junyi Jessy Li, and Casey Kennington were elected. The President also appointed Barbara Di Eugenio, Annie Louis and Raquel Fernandez for the board. Jason Williams is our President Emeritus and Amanda Stent administers the SIGdial website and mailing list. We also have liaisons to a variety of other groups, including IUI, ISCA, AVIOS, SIGGEN, IEEE, etc.
SIGdial has held an annual workshop on discourse and dialog since 2000; the workshop became a conference in 2009. SIGDIAL 2018 was held in Melbourne, Australia, co-located with ACL 2018. SIGDIAL 2018 included one special session on Physically Situated Dialogue. The organizers were: Kazunori Komatani (general chair), Diane Litman and Kai Yu (program co-chairs), Lawrence Cavedon (local chair), Alex Papangelis (mentoring chair) and Mikio Nakano (sponsorship chair). The keynote speakers were Mari Ostendorf, Ingrid Zukerman, and Milica Gasic. SIGDIAL 2018 received a total of 111 submissions, and accepted 52 papers: 36 long papers, 12 short papers, and 4 demo papers. These numbers give an overall acceptance rate of 47%. The rates separately for types of papers are 54% for long papers, 31% for short papers, and 80% for demo papers. 19 long papers were presented as talks; the remaining long papers and all short papers were presented as posters. We thank the SIGDIAL 2017 sponsors, including Honda Research Institute, Microsoft, Interactions, Nextremer, Amazon, Adobe Researc, Apple, Tricorn (Beijing) Technology, ETS, PolyAI, Toshiba Research Europe, Monash University, Uber, and RMIT University. As is now SIGDIAL tradition, we video-record oral presentations with permission of the presenters and archived these online (https://www.superlectures.com/sigdial2018/).
Since 2005, the Young Researchers’ Roundtable on Spoken Dialog Systems (YRRSDS) has been co-located with SIGDIAL, and starting in 2016 YRRSDS officially became the second annual event of SIGdial. YRRSDS is organized by early-stage researchers, and experiments with innovating meeting formats. YRRSDS 2018 was attended by approximately 30 early-stage researchers.
SIGDIAL 2019 will be held in Stockholm, Sweden, 11-13 September, in “near co-location” with Interspeech. The organizers of SIGDIAL 2019 are: Satoshi Nakamura (General Chair), Ingrid Zukerman and Milica Gašić (program co-chairs), Gabriel Skantze (local chair), Mikio Nakano (Sponsorship chair), and Alexander Papangelis (mentoring chair). Planning for SIGDIAL 2020 is underway now, with the location set to Boise, USA.
SIGdial also endorses other dialog-related workshops and events that are open to the general community. In 2018-2019 we endorsed IWSDS 2018 and the journal Dialogue & Discourse.