2025Q3 Reports: SIGDIAL
SIGdial annual report to ACL for 2024-2025
Dilek Hakkani-Tür, 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 417 members. You can find the membership information here: https://www.sigdial.org/membership/. In addition to the mailing list, SIGdial X account has more than 500 followers. We have also initiated SIGdial accounts on LinkedIn and BlueSky recently, in order to extend our outreach. Our most recent regular election was held in 2025, and the upcoming SIGdial officers are: Alexandros Papangelis (President), Stefan Ultes (Vice President), Koichiro Yoshino (Secretary) and Casey Kennington (Treasurer). For the Scientific Advisory Board, A. Seza Dogruoz, Guiseppe Riccardi, and Svetlana Stoyanchev were elected. Three other members for the board will be selected by the President. Dilek Hakkani-Tur will be our President Emeritus. The next election is planned for the first half of 2027. 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 2024 was held in Kyoto, Japan, between September 18-21. The main conference was preceded by two days of the YRRSDS workshop (September 16-17). The organizers of SIGdial 2024 were: Tatsuya Kawahara (General chair), Vera Demberg and Stefan Ultes (Program co-chairs), Shikib Mehri and David Howcroft (Mentoring chairs), Ramesh Manuvinakurike (Sponsorships chair), Kazunori Komatani (Publications chair), Ryuichiro Higashinaka (Publicity chair), Angus Addlesee (Social media chair), Koji Inoue (Local arrangements chair), Divesh Lala, Keiko Ochi, and Mikey Elmers (Local arrangements team).
SIGdial 2024 received a total of 164 submissions this year, comprising 122 long papers, 56 short papers, and 7 demo descriptions. 65 papers were accepted in total: 44 long papers (36%), 17 short papers (30%), and 4 demo descriptions, for an overall acceptance rate of 39.6%. In addition, 3 articles from the Dialogue and Discourse journal were selected by the program committee for poster presentations. We gratefully acknowledge the support of our sponsors: Apple (Gold), SB Intuitions (Gold), Cyber Agent (Gold), Equmenopolis (Gold), PKSH Technology (Gold), Google (Silver), and Fairy Devices (Bronze). 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.
SIGdial 2025 will take place in Avignon, France, between August 25-27. The organizers of SIGdial 2024 are: Frederic Bechet and Fabrice Lefevre (General chairs), Nicholas Asher and Seokhwan Kim (Program co-chairs), A. Seza Dogruoz (Mentoring chair), Ramesh Manuvinakurike (Sponsorships chair), Teva Merlin (Publication chair), Tania Jimenez (Publicity chair), Angus Addlesee (Social media chair), Yannick Esteve (Local arrangements chair), Nathalie Camelin, Corinne Fredouille, and Salima Mdaffar (Local arrangements team).
SIGdial 2026 is planned to be located at Emory University, in July or August, with Jinho Choi as the General Chair. SIGdial also endorses other dialog-related workshops and events that are open to the general community, such as the Dialogue & Discourse journal.