2026Q3 Reports: SIGDIAL
SIGdial annual report to ACL for 2025-2026
Alexandros Papangelis, 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 411 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 were selected by the President: Koji Inoue, Asli Celikyilmaz, and Thomas Schaaf. Dilek Hakkani-Tur is 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 2025 was held in Avignon, France, between August 25-27. The main conference was followed by two days of workshops: YRRSDS 2025 (August 28-29), DSTC 12 (August 28), and Automin 2025 (August 28). The organizers of SIGdial 2025 were: Frédéric Béchet and Fabrice Lefèvre (General Chairs), Nicholas Asher and Seokhwan Kim (Program Chairs), A. Seza Doğruöz (Mentoring Chair), Ramesh Manuvinakurike (Sponsorship Chair), Teva Merlin (Publication Chair), Tania Jimenez (Publicity Chair), Angus Addlesee (Social Media Chair), and Yannick Estève (Local Arrangements Chair).
SIGdial 2025 received a total of 116 submissions, comprising 75 long papers, 38 short papers, and 3 demo descriptions. 59 papers were accepted in total: 41 long papers (55%), 16 short papers (42%), and 2 demo descriptions, for an overall acceptance rate of 50.9%. In addition, 2 articles from the Dialogue and Discourse journal were selected by the program committee for poster presentations. We gratefully acknowledge the support of our exclusive sponsor: ADAY (Platinum).
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 2026 will take place in Atlanta, Georgia, USA, between August 2-5. The organizers of SIGdial 2026 are: Jinho D. Choi (General Chair), Yun-Nung (Vivian) Chen and Kotaro Funakoshi (Program Chairs), Kartik Goya and Sandeep Sonil (Local Chairs), Teruhisa Misu (Sponsorship Chair), and Ali Emami (Publication Chair).
SIGdial 2027 is planned to be located in Japan, tentatively in between August 23-25. SIGdial also endorses other dialog-related workshops and events that are open to the general community, such as the Dialogue & Discourse journal.