====SIGDIAL 2016 CONFERENCE: SECOND CALL FOR PAPERS====

http://www.sigdial.org/workshops/conference17/

SIGDIAL 2016 CONFERENCE 17th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest

Group on Discourse and Dialogue, the University of Southern California

Institute for Creative Technologies, Los Angeles, CA, USA. September

13-15, 2016 (just after INTERSPEECH)

Submission Deadline: 15 May, 2016

**NEWS**

INVITED SPEAKERS

We are happy to announce our invited speakers:

- Susan Brennan, NSF/Stony Brook

http://www.psychology.sunysb.edu/sbrennan-/

- Louis-Philippe Morency, CMU

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~morency/

SPECIAL SESSION

We will have a special session on 'The Future Directions of

Dialogue-Based Intelligent Personal Assistants'.

website: http://articulab.hcii.cs.cmu.edu/sigdial2016/

Organizers:

- Yoichi Matsuyama (CMU)

- Alexandros Papangelis (Toshiba Cambridge Research Laboratory)

See below for more details.

====

CALL FOR PAPERS

The SIGDIAL venue provides a regular forum for the presentation of

cutting edge research in discourse and dialogue to both academic and

industry researchers. Continuing with a series of successful sixteen

previous meetings, this conference spans the research interest area of

discourse and dialogue. The conference is sponsored by the SIGDIAL

organization, which serves as the Special Interest Group in discourse

and dialogue for both ACL and ISCA. SIGDIAL 2016 will be co-located

with INTERSPEECH 2016 (http://interspeech2016.org/) as a satellite

event, and also with YRRSDS 2016 (http://www.yrrsds.org/), the Young

Researchers' Roundtable on Spoken Dialog Systems.

TOPICS OF INTEREST

We welcome formal, corpus-based, implementation, experimental, or

analytical work on discourse and dialogue including, but not

restricted to, the following themes:

1. Discourse Processing and Dialogue Systems

Discourse semantic and pragmatic issues in NLP applications such as

text summarization, question answering, and information retrieval.

Spoken, multi-modal, and text/web based dialogue systems, their

components, evaluation and applications.

2. Corpora, Tools and Methodology

Corpus-based and experimental work on discourse and spoken, text-based

and multi-modal dialogue, including supporting topics such as

annotation tools and schemes, and corpora.

3. Pragmatic and/or Semantic Modeling

The pragmatics and/or semantics of discourse and dialogue (i.e. beyond

a single sentence).

SUBMISSIONS

The program committee welcomes the submission of long papers, short

papers and demo descriptions. Papers submitted as long papers may be

accepted as long papers for oral presentation, long papers for poster

presentation, or short papers for poster presentation. Short papers

will be presented as posters.

- Long papers must be no longer than eight pages, including title,

text, figures and tables. An unlimited number of pages are allowed

for references. Two additional pages are allowed for example

discourses or dialogues and algorithms.

- Short papers should be no longer than four pages including title,

text, figures and tables. An unlimited number of pages are allowed

for references.

- Demo descriptions should be no longer than four pages including

title, text, examples, figures, tables and references.

Authors are encouraged to also submit additional accompanying

materials such as corpora (or corpus examples), demo code, videos,

sound files, etc.

Please use the official ACL style files: http://acl2016.org/files/acl2016.zip

Papers that have been or will be submitted to other meetings or

publications must provide this information (see submission

format). SIGDIAL 2016 cannot accept for publication or presentation

work that will be (or has been) published elsewhere. Any questions

regarding submissions can be sent to program-chairs<at>sigdial.org.

INVITED SPEAKERS

- Susan Brennan, NSF/Stony Brook

http://www.psychology.sunysb.edu/sbrennan-/

- Louis-Philippe Morency, CMU

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~morency/

SPECIAL SESSION

The Future Directions of Dialogue-Based Intelligent Personal Assistants

Organizers:

- Yoichi Matsuyama (CMU)

- Alexandros Papangelis (Toshiba Cambridge Research Laboratory)

Today is the era of intelligent personal assistants. All the major

tech giants have introduced personal assistants as the front end of

their services, including Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana,

Facebook's M, and Amazon's Alexa. Several of these companies have also

released bot toolkits so that other smaller companies can join the

fray. However, while the quality of conversational interactions with

intelligent personal assistants is crucial for their success in both

business and personal applications, fundamental problems, such as

discourse processing, computational pragmatics, user modeling, and

collecting and annotating adequate real data, remain

unsolved. Furthermore, the intelligent personal assistants of tomorrow

raise a whole set of new technical problems.

The SIGDIAL special session 'The Future of Dialogue-Based Intelligent

Personal Assistants' will consist of talks and posters that introduce

and evaluate solutions to dialogue system challenges preventing the

development of effective and compelling intelligent personal

assistants. Researchers from both academia and industry are welcome. A

panel of notable academic and industry players will lead to insights

on future directions.

The special session will last 2.5 hours and will consist of long/short

paper presentations, poster presentations, and a panel discussion

entitled 'The Future Directions of Dialogue Based Intelligent Personal

Assistants'. For more information, please visit the special session

website: http://articulab.hcii.cs.cmu.edu/sigdial2016/

The papers submitted to the special session are handled by special

session organizers, but for the submitted papers to be in the SIGDIAL

proceedings, they have to undergo the same review process as regular

papers.

MENTORING

Submissions with innovative core ideas that may be in need of language

(English) or organizational assistance will be flagged for 'mentoring'

and 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 this initiative can

be addressed to the mentoring chair Pierre Lison (University of Oslo,

Norway plison@ifi.uio.no).

BEST PAPER AWARDS

In order to recognize significant advancements in dialog/discourse

science and technology, SIGDIAL will recognize BEST PAPER AWARDs. All

papers at the conference are eligible for the best paper awards. A

selection committee consisting of prominent researchers in the fields

of interest will select the recipients of the awards.

IMPORTANT DATES

Submission: 15 May, 2016

Notification of acceptance: 28 Jun, 2016

Final submission: 21 Jul, 2016

Conference: 13-15 Sept, 2016

WEBSITES

Conference website: http://www.sigdial.org/workshops/conference17

Submission link: To be announced

SIGdial organization website: http://www.sigdial.org

Co-located Conference website:

INTERSPEECH 2016 http://interspeech2016.org/

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

For any questions, please contact the appropriate members of the

organizing committee.

General Chairs

Raquel Fernandez, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands

Wolfgang Minker, Ulm University, Germany

general-chairs<at>sigdial.org

Program Chairs

Giuseppe Carenini, The University of British Columbia, Canada

Ryuichiro Higashinaka, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation, Japan

program-chairs<at>sigdial.org

Local Chairs

Ron Artstein, University of Southern California, USA

Alesia Gainer, University of Southern California, USA

local-organizers<at>sigdial.org

Mentoring Chair

Pierre Lison, University of Oslo, Norway

mentoring<at>sigdial.org

Sponsorships Chair

Ethan Selfridge, Interactions Corporation, USA

sponsor-chair<at>sigdial.org

SIGdial President

Amanda Stent, Yahoo! Inc., USA

SIGdial Vice President

Jason Williams, Microsoft Research, USA

SIGdial Secretary/Treasurer

Kristiina Jokinen, University of Helsinki, Finland

To contact SIGdial President, vice presidents, and secretary/treasurer, send an

email to exec<at>sigdial.org.