2011Q3 Reports: SIGDIAL
REPORT ON SIGDIAL ACTIVITIES: June 2010 to June 2011
Tim Paek, SIGDIAL President
SIGDIAL is the ACL and ISCA Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue. More information about SIGDIAL can be found on our newly designed website: http://www.sigdial.org, including an updated calendar of upcoming events, resources, and previous reports. Users can also become members from the website; membership 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.
An election of Executive Board members and three elected Science Advisory Committee members was held on September, 2010. All terms are for two years. Voting results were announced in January. All three encumbent Executive Board members were re-elected: Tim Paek (President), Amanda Stent (Vice President), and Kristiina Jokinen (Secretary). For the elected Scientific Advisory Board, the following new members were elected: Joyce Chai, Matthew Purver, and Ingrid Zukerman. They join the appointed Scientific Advisory Board members: Mikio Nakano, 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, SIGGEN Liaison: Sebastian Vargas and IEEE SLT Liaison: Roberto Pieraccini, Mailing List Maintainer: Laurent Romary.
SIGDIAL has held an annual workshop on discourse and dialogue since 2000. Due to our steady growth of members, starting in 2009, the SIGDIAL venue became a conference and began to recognize Best Paper awards. The SIGDIAL 2010 was held in Tokyo, Japan. The Conference Chairs were Yasuhiro Katagiri and Mikio Nakano. The Technical Program Chairs were Raquel Fern·ndez and Oliver Lemon. Kazunori Komatani served as the Local Chair. 97 papers were submitted, 23 of which were accepted as full papers, 20 as poster papers and demo papers. For 2011, SIGDIAL will be held in Portland, Oregon, in co-location with ACL 2011. The Conference Chairs are Johanna Moore and David Traum. The Technical Program Chairs are Joyce Chai and Rebecca Passonneau. Peter Heeman is serving as the Local Chair. This year, 68 papers were submitted, 25 of which were accepted as full papers, 11 as poster papers and demo papers. The next venue will be in Korea, again co-located with ACL. The Conference Chairs will be Gary Geunbae Lee and Jonathan Ginzburg. The Technical Program Chairs will be Claire Gardent and Amanda Stent. The Local Chair will be Minhwa Chung. A Call for Papers will be released soon.
Every year, the SIGDIAL Board votes on and implements various initiatives. For 2010, we started a mentoring initiative spearheaded by Jason Williams. The initiative was successful, and a report about lessons learned was given during the 2010 Business Meeting: http://www.sigdial.org/businessmeetings/tokyo2010/. The SIGDIAL Board also voted to seek out technical co-sponsorship from IEEE SLT, which, similar to our relationship with AAAI, does not involve any financial support. Due to late recognition from IEEE, we will begin advertising IEEE SLT co-sponsorship starting in 2012. The Board also voted to become an industrial partner of SpeechTek Europe 2011. Again, this arrangement is only for advertising purposes. Finally, in order to revitalize our image and foster participation in the SIGDIAL community, last year we also announced a SIGDIAL logo competition with a cash prize of $200 and free registration at SIGDIAL 2011. We received 18 entries and a winning logo was announced; it is the new logo on our website: http://www.sigdial.org.
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:
- June, 2011: Young Researcher's Roundtable in Spoken Dialogue Systems
- September, 2011: IWSDS2011 Workshop on Paralinguistic Information and its Integration in Spoken Dialogue Systems