Call for Papers

SIGDIAL 2017 CONFERENCE

Tuesday, August 15 to Thursday, August 17, 2017

http://www.sigdial.org/workshops/conference18/

The 18th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL 2017) will be held at Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany on August 15-17, 2017.

SIGDIAL 2017 will be co-located with SemDial 2017, the 21st Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue. SIGDIAL and SemDial will run concurrently on August 15-17 and will share a joint special session. SIGDIAL will occur immediately after the Young Researchers' Roundtable on Spoken Dialog Systems (YRRSDS 2017) on August 13-14 in Saarbrücken, and will precede Interspeech 2017 on August 20-24 in Stockholm, Sweden.

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 seventeen successful previous meetings, this conference spans the research interest areas

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.

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:

- Discourse Processing and Dialogue Systems

- Corpora, Tools and Methodology

- Pragmatic and/or Semantic Modeling

- Dimensions of Interaction

- Open Domain Dialogue and Chat Systems

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

- Applications of Dialogue and Discourse Processing Technology

- Novel Methods for Generation Within Dialogue

- Multi-Modal, Embodied, and Situated Dialogue

- Dialogue in Virtual Reality Applications and Human-Robot Interaction

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 or long papers for poster presentation. Accepted 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.

Important Note: In a change from previous years, reviewing at SIGDIAL 2017 will be double blind. Papers must not include authors’ names and affiliations. Additionally, self-references that reveal the author’s identity, e.g., “We previously showed (Smith, 1991) …“ must

be avoided. Instead, use citations such as “Smith previously showed (Smith, 1991) …“ Papers that do not conform to these requirements will be rejected without review.

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 2017 style files:

http://acl2017.org/calls/papers/#paper-submission-and-templates

Papers that have been or will be submitted to other meetings or publications must provide this information (see submission link). SIGDIAL 2017 cannot accept work for publication or presentation that will be (or has been) published elsewhere. Any questions regarding submissions can be sent to program-chairs<at>sigdial.org.

SPECIAL SESSIONS

Special session proposals will undergo the regular SIGDIAL review process. The deadline for special session proposals is March 1, 2017.

SIGDIAL 2017 will include a joint special session with SemDial 2017 (SaarDial), the 21st Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue.

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.

BEST PAPER AWARDS

In order to recognize significant advancements in dialogue/discourse science and technology, SIGDIAL 2017 will include 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

Special Session Submission: 1 March 2017 (23:59, GMT-11)

Special Session Notification: 10 March 2017

Long, Short and Demonstration Paper Submission: 18 April 2017 (23:59, GMT-11)

Long, Short and Demonstration Paper Notification: 9 June 2017

Final Paper Submission: 7 July 2017

Conference: 15-17 August 2017

WEBSITES

SIGDIAL 2017: http://www.sigdial.org/workshops/conference18/

Co-located and related events:

• YRRSDS 2017: https://sites.google.com/site/2017yrrsds/

• SemDial 2017 (SaarDial): http://www.saardial.uni-saarland.de

• Interspeech 2017: http://www.interspeech2017.org/

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

For any questions, please contact the appropriate members of the

organizing committee.

General Chairs

Kristiina Jokinen, University of Helsinki, Finland and University of Tartu, Estonia

Manfred Stede, University of Potsdam, Germany

Program Chairs

David DeVault, University of Southern California, USA

Annie Louis, University of Essex, UK

Local Chairs

Ivana Kruijff-Korbayova, University of Saarland and DFKI

Volha Petukhova, University of Saarland

Mentoring Chair

Pierre Lison, Norwegian Computing Center, Norway

Sponsorships Chair

Ethan Selfridge, Interactions Corporation, USA

SIGdial President

Amanda Stent, Bloomberg, USA

SIGdial Vice President

Jason Williams, Microsoft Research, USA

SIGdial Secretary/Treasurer

Kristiina Jokinen, University of Helsinki, Finland and University of Tartu, Estonia