SIGDIAL 2014 CONFERENCE
Wednesday, June 18 to Friday, June 20, 2014   

The 15th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialog will be
co-located with the 8th International Conference on Natural Language Generation (INLG 2014) in Philadelphia, PA, USA and immediately preceding ACL 2014.

     http://www.sigdial.org/workshops/conference15

CALL FOR PAPERS

The 2014 SIGDIAL conference continues a series of fourteen conferences, providing a regular forum for the presentation of cutting edge research across the areas of discourse and dialog and attracting a diverse set of participants from academia and industry. The conference is sponsored by the SIGdial organization, which serves as the Special Interest Group on discourse and dialog for both ACL and ISCA.

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

We are pleased to announce our keynote speakers will be Prof. Steve Young from the University of Cambridge and Prof. Lillian Lee from Cornell University.

TOPICS OF INTEREST

We welcome formal, corpus-based, system-building or analytical work on discourse and dialog including but not restricted to the following themes and topics:

- Discourse Processing and Dialog Systems

- Corpora, Tools and Methodology

- Pragmatic and/or Semantic Modeling

- Dimensions of Interaction

- Open Domain Dialog

- Style, Voice and Personality in Spoken Dialog and Written Text

- Applications of Dialog and Discourse Processing Technology

- Novel Methods for Generation Within Dialog for a joint special session with INLG

SPECIAL SESSIONS

There will be one special session co-located with INLG on the morning of June 20th. There will be a second special session on the Dialogue State Tracking Challenge (DSTC). Proposals for additional special sessions are also still welcome. Special sessions submission will undergo regular SIGdial review process.

IMPORTANT DATES

Special Session Proposal Deadline:          Sunday, 9 February 2014 (23:59, GMT-11)

Special Session Notification:                     Monday, 17 February 2014

Long, Short and Demonstration

Paper Submission Deadline:                       Sunday, 9 March 2014 (23:59, GMT-11)

Paper Notification:                                       Friday, 18 April 2014

Final Paper Due

- For papers accepted subject

 to receiving mentoring                                   Wednesday, 14 May  2014

- For accepted papers                                    Friday, 23 May 2014

Conference                                                  Wednesday, June 18, 2014 to Friday, June 20, 2014

SUBMISSIONS

Special Session Proposals

The SIGdial organizers welcome the submission of special session proposals.  A SIGDIAL special session is the length of a regular session at the conference; may be organized as a poster session, a poster session with panel discussion, or an oral presentation session; and will be held on the last day of the conference.  Special sessions may, at the discretion of the SIGdial organizers, be held as parallel sessions.  Those wishing to organize a special session should prepare a two-page proposal containing:  a summary of the topic of the special session; a list of organizers and sponsors; a list of people who may submit and participate; and a requested format (poster/panel/oral session).  These proposals should be sent to conference[a]sigdial.org by the special session proposal deadline.  Special session proposals will be reviewed jointly by the general and program co-chairs. 

Papers 

The program committee welcomes the submission of long papers, short papers, and demonstration descriptions. All accepted submissions will be published in the conference proceedings.

Long papers may, at the discretion of the technical program committee, be accepted for oral or poster presentation. They must be no longer than 8 pages, including title, content, and examples. Two additional pages are allowed for references and appendices, which may include extended example discourses or dialogs, algorithms, graphical representations, etc.

Short papers will be presented as posters. They should be no longer than 4 pages, including title and content. One additional page is allowed for references and appendices.

Demonstration papers should be no longer than 3 pages, including references. A separate one-page document should be provided to the program co-chairs for demonstration descriptions, specifying furniture and equipment needed for the demo.

Authors of a submission may designate their paper to be considered for a SIGDIAL special session, which would highlight a particular area or topic.  All papers will undergo regular peer review. 

Papers that have been or will be submitted to other meetings or publications must provide this information (see submission format). A paper accepted for presentation at SIGDIAL 2014 must not have been presented at any other meeting with publicly available proceedings. Any questions regarding submissions can be sent to the program co-chairs at program-chairs[at]sigdial.org.

Authors are encouraged to submit additional supportive material such as video clips or sound clips and examples of available resources for review purposes.

Submission is electronic using paper submission software.

FORMAT

All long, short, and demonstration submissions should follow the two-column ACL 2014 format. We strongly recommend the use of ACL LaTeX style files or Microsoft Word style files tailored for the ACL 2014 conference. Submissions must conform to the official ACL 2014 style guidelines (http://www.cs.jhu.edu/ACL2014/CallforPapers.htm), and they must be electronic in PDF. As in most previous years, submissions will not be anonymous.

MENTORING SERVICE

For several years, the SIGDIAL conference has offered a mentoring service. Submissions with innovative core ideas that may need language (English) or organizational assistance will be flagged for 'mentoring' and conditionally accepted with recommendation to revise with a mentor. An experienced mentor who has previously published in the SIGDIAL venue will then help the authors of these flagged papers prepare their submissions for publication. Any questions about the mentoring service can be addressed to the mentoring chair at mentoring[at]sigdial.org.

STUDENT SUPPORT

SIGdial also offers a limited number of scholarships for students presenting a paper accepted to the conference. Application materials will be posted at the conference website.

BEST PAPER AWARDS

In order to recognize significant advancements in dialog and discourse science and technology, SIGDIAL will recognize two best paper awards. A selection committee consisting of prominent researchers in the fields of interest will select the recipients of the awards.

SPONSORSHIP

SIGDIAL offers a number of opportunities for sponsors. For more information, email the conference organizers at sponsor-chair[at]sigdial.org.

DIALOG AND DISCOURSE

SIGDIAL authors are encouraged to submit their research to the journal Dialog and Discourse, which is endorsed by SIGdial.

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

General Co-Chairs

Kallirroi Georgila, University of Southern California, USA

Matthew Stone, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, USA

Technical Program Co-Chairs

Helen Hastie, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, UK

Ani Nenkova, University of Pennsylvania, USA

Mentoring Chair

Svetlana Stoyanchev, AT&T Research Labs, USA

Local Chair

Keelan Evanini, Educational Testing Service, USA

Sponsorships Chair

Giuseppe Di Fabbrizio, Amazon.com, USA

SIGdial President

Amanda Stent, Yahoo! Labs, USA

SIGdial Vice President

Jason Williams, Microsoft Research, USA

SIGdial Secretary/Treasurer

Kristiina Jokinen, University of Helsinki, Finland