LREC 2016 Workshop on Collecting and Generating Resources for Chatbots and Conversational Agents - Development and Evaluation

Event Notification Type: 
Call for Papers
Abbreviated Title: 
RE-WOCHAT
Saturday, 28 May 2016
Country: 
Slovenia
City: 
Portorož
Contact: 
Rafael E. Banchs
Ryuichiro Higashinaka
Submission Deadline: 
Monday, 15 February 2016

CALL FOR PAPERS

RE-WOCHAT: LREC 2016 Workshop on Collecting and Generating Resources for Chatbots and Conversational Agents - Development and Evaluation

http://workshop.colips.org/re-wochat/

Workshop Description

Although non goal-oriented dialogue systems have been around for many years (almost fifty years
indeed, if we consider Weizenbaum's Eliza system as the starting milestone), they have been recently
gaining a lot of popularity in both research and commercial arenas. From the commercial stand point,
non goal-oriented dialogue seems to be providing an excellent means to engage users for
entertainment purposes, as well as to give a more human-like appearance to established vertical
goal-oriented dialogue systems.

From the research perspective, on the other hand, this kind of systems poses interesting challenges
and problems to the research community. The main objective of the workshop is to bring together
researchers working on problems related to chat-oriented dialogue for promoting discussion and
knowledge sharing about the state-of-the-art and novel techniques in this field, as well as to
coordinate a collaborative effort to collect/generate data, resources and evaluation protocols for
future research in this area.

Topics of Interest

This workshop invites original research contributions on all aspects of non goal-oriented dialogue,
including closely related areas such as knowledge representation and reasoning, language generation,
and natural language understanding, among others. In this sense the workshop will invite for both
long and short paper submissions in areas including (but not restricted to):

- Chat-oriented dialogue systems
- Data collections and resources
- Information extraction
- Natural language understanding
- General domain knowledge representation
- Common sense and reasoning
- Natural language generation
- Emotion detection and generation
- Sense of humour detection and generation
- Chat-oriented dialogue evaluation
- User studies and system evaluation
- Multimodal human-computer interaction

Paper Format and Submissions

Paper submissions to RE-WOCHAT should follow the LREC 2016 paper submission policy. In accordance
with LREC policy, papers are not required to be anonymous. Both full papers (8 pages) and short
papers (4 pages) are welcomed.
Paper submission link: https://www.softconf.com/lrec2016/RE-WOCHAT/

Important Dates

February 15, 2016: Paper Submission Deadline
March 10, 2016: Paper Acceptance Notification
March 24, 2016: Camera Ready Version Deadline

Share your LRs! Initiative and ISLRN Number:

Describing your LRs in the LRE Map is now a normal practice in the submission procedure of LREC
(introduced in 2010 and adopted by other conferences). To continue the efforts initiated at LREC
2014 about "Sharing LRs" (data, tools, web-services, etc.), authors will have the possibility, when
submitting a paper, to upload LRs in a special LREC repository. This effort of sharing LRs, linked
to the LRE Map for their description, may become a new "regular" feature for conferences in our
field, thus contributing to creating a common repository where everyone can deposit and share data.

As scientific work requires accurate citations of referenced work so as to allow the community to
understand the whole context and also replicate the experiments conducted by other researchers, LREC
2016 endorses the need to uniquely Identify LRs through the use of the International Standard
Language Resource Number (ISLRN, www.islrn.org), a Persistent Unique Identifier to be assigned to
each Language Resource. The assignment of ISLRNs to LRs cited in LREC papers will be offered at
submission time.

Workshop organizers:

Rafael E. Banchs
Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore

Ryuichiro Higashinaka
NTT Media Intelligence Laboratories, Nippon telegraph and telephone corporation, Japan

Wolfgang Minker
Institute of Communications Engineering, Ulm University, Germany

Joseph Mariani
Institute for Multilingual and Multimedia Information (IMMI) & LIMSI-CNRS, France

David Traum
University of Southern California, Institute for Creative Technologies, USA