IdoDagan: New page: REPORT ON SIGDIAL ACTIVITIES: June 2008 to July 2009 Tim Paek, SIGDIAL President Kristiina Jokinen, SIGDIAL Secretary-Treasurer SIGDIAL is the ACL and ISCA Special Interest Group on Disc...

2009-07-09T12:56:03Z

New page: REPORT ON SIGDIAL ACTIVITIES: June 2008 to July 2009 Tim Paek, SIGDIAL President Kristiina Jokinen, SIGDIAL Secretary-Treasurer SIGDIAL is the ACL and ISCA Special Interest Group on Disc...

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REPORT ON SIGDIAL ACTIVITIES: June 2008 to July 2009

Tim Paek, SIGDIAL President
Kristiina Jokinen, SIGDIAL Secretary-Treasurer

SIGDIAL is the ACL and ISCA Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue.
More information about SIGDIAL can be found on the webpages:
http://www.sigdial.org
including an updated calendar of upcoming events, resources, and previous
reports. Members can join from the webpage, which includes participation in a
low-volume, moderated mailing list (mainly conference and job announcements).
SIGDIAL currently has 472 members from 36 countries (though we are currently
trying to filter non-active accounts). SIGDIAL is fully compliant with ACL
and ISCA guidelines for SIGs.

An election of officers and three advisory board members was held in Spring
of 2008 for a 2 year term. SIGDIAL is currently led by officers Tim Paek
(President), Amanda Stent (Vice President), and Kristiina Jokinen (Secretary-
Treasurer), and Science Advisory Committee members Mikio Nakano, Michael
McTear, David Schlangen, Candace Sidner, Janyce Wiebe and Jason Williams.
Additional positions are President Emeritus: David Traum, Information officer:
Karen Ward, SIG SLUD/JSAI liaison: Yasuhiro Katagiri, ISCA Liaison: Michael
Picheny, AVIOS Liaison: Alexander Rudnicky, SIGSEM Liaison: Harry Bunt, and
IEEE SLT Liaison: Roberto Pieraccini, Mailing List Maintainer: Laurent Romary.
Due to the opening of a separate euro-account for the Sigdial conferences and
the added responsibility of the related financial issues, the title of the
secretary was also changed to Secretary-Treasurer.

SIGDIAL has held an annual workshop on discourse and dialogue since 2000.
The last workshop was held in June 19-20, 2008, in Columbus, Ohio, just
after the ACL/HLT 2008 conference. The program chairs were Beth Ann Hockey
and David Schlangen, and Simon Keizer was local arrangements chair. More
information on SIGDIAL workshops can be found here:
http://www.sigdial.org/workshops/

Moving into the future, SIGDIAL recently announced that the new annual meeting
will no longer be a workshop, but rather a conference. The conference will be
held immediately following Interspeech 2007 on September 11-12, 2009 at Queen
Mary University of London. The General Co-Chairs will be Pat Healy and Roberto
Pieraccini. The Technical Co-Chairs will be Donna Byron and Steve Young. The
SIGDIAL 2009 website can be found here:
http://www.sigdial.org/workshops/workshop10/.
Upon inaugurating SIGDIAL 2009 as a conference, we will be recognizing a Best
Paper Award as well as a Best Student Paper award. Submissions were closed on
May 4, and notifications of acceptance have been sent out. We received a
record number of submissions this year: 110 papers.

Several new initiatives are underway including:

* a revamped website with more resources and Wiki ability for community participation
* launching of a new open access journal specializing in dialogue and discourse
* outreach to various related research communities

SIGDIAL also endorses a number of other dialogue-related workshops and events
that are open to the general community. The SIGDIAL Endorsed events for the
upcoming year are:

* May, 2009: Towards a Standard Markup Language for Embodied Dialogue Acts (Budapest, Hungary)
* June, 2009: DiaHolmia: 2009 Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue (Stockholm, Sweden)
* July 2009: 6th Workshop on Knowledge and Reasoning in Practical Dialogue Systems (Pasadena, CA)
* July, 2010: Second NLG Challenge on Generating Instructions in Virtual Environments (GIVE)

Financial organisation of the SIGDial workshops co-located with the main
ACL conferences has been possible through the ACL "shadow" account. This is
managed by the ACL officers but the budget for the workshops is supervised
and agreed in cooperation with the workshop chairs and the SIGdial officers.
Financial arrangements for the meetings not co-located with ACL have been
taken care of by the chairs of the workshops through their university
accounts. The overheads generated by these events, due to an unexpectedly
large number of participants, is kept on a separate SIGDial account located
in Helsinki. The account is in euros, and it is managed by the Secretary-
Treasurer and the President.

2009Q3 Reports: SIGDIAL - Revision history

IdoDagan: New page: REPORT ON SIGDIAL ACTIVITIES: June 2008 to July 2009 Tim Paek, SIGDIAL President Kristiina Jokinen, SIGDIAL Secretary-Treasurer SIGDIAL is the ACL and ISCA Special Interest Group on Disc...