NIPS 2015 Workshop on Machine Learning for Spoken Language Understanding and Interaction

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Call for Papers

Machine Learning for Spoken Language Understanding and Interaction

http://slunips2015.wix.com/slunips2015#!call-for-papers/aboutPage

Date: 11th December 2015

A workshop at the Twenty-Ninth Annual Conference on

Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS 2015)

Montreal, QC, Canada, December 11, 2015.

Important dates:

4th October 2015 Paper Submission

24th October 2015 Notification of Acceptance

29th October 2015 Camera Ready Submission

11th December 2015 Workshop Day

The emergence of virtual personal assistants such as SIRI, Cortana, Echo, and Google Now, is generating increasing interest in research in speech understanding and spoken interaction. However, whilst the ability of these agents to recognize conversational speech is maturing rapidly, their ability to understand and interact is still limited to a few specific domains, such as weather information, local businesses, and some simple chit-chat. Their conversational capabilities are not necessarily apparent to users.  Interaction typically depends on handcrafted scripts and is often guided by simple commands. Deployed dialogue models do not fully make use of the large amount of data that these agents generate. Promising approaches that involve statistical models, big data analysis, representation of knowledge (hierarchical, relations, etc. ), utilizing and enriching semantic graphs with natural language components, multi-modality, etc. are being explored in multiple communities, such as natural language processing (NLP), speech processing, machine learning (ML), and information retrieval. However, we are still only scratching the surface in this field.

The goal of this workshop is to bring together both applied and theoretical researchers in spoken/natural language processing and machine learning to facilitate the discussion of new frameworks that can help advance modern conversational systems. We invite you to submit original papers. Papers will be peer-reviewed and presented as posters.

Proceedings will be published online in open access. Organizers also target a special issue in a dedicated journal, after the workshop.

Invited Speakers/Panelists:

Jason Weston, Facebook AI

Li Deng - Microsoft Research

Larry Heck - Google

Dan Roth - University of Ilinois - Urbana Champaign

Tomas Mikolov - Facebook AI

Kallirroi Georgila - University of Southern California

Pascal Poupart - University of Waterloo

Alan Black - Carnegie Mellon University

Olivier Pietquin - Lille University

Blaise Thomson - VocalIQ

 Paper format:

4-6 pages + one page for references only. The submission web site is:

http://slunips2015.wix.com/slunips2015#!submission/s1ifo

Organizing committee:

Asli Celikyilmaz, Microsoft

Milica Ga?i?, University of Cambridge

Dilek Hakkani-Tür, Microsoft Research

Contact:

slunips15@gmail.com

http://slunips2015.wix.com/slunips2015