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SigDial 2017 Special Session:

Natural Language Generation for Dialogue Systems

First Call for Papers

Paper Submission: 18th April 2017

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

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* MOTIVATION

While natural language generation (NLG) for dialogue interaction has been a long-standing research topic, there has been a recent explosion of work due to industrial interest in conversational assistants such as Alexa, Siri, Cortana and Google Assistant. Recent advances in the field of deep learning together with the availability of large corpora of human dialogues from social media has also contributed to new research techniques for language generation. However, to date, neural methods have not been able to replicate much of the rich dialogue phenomena targeted by previous rule-based, statistical and data-driven approaches for language generation for dialogue.

* TOPIC SUBMISSION

We invite submissions which address specific issues including but not limited to:

- Generation in the context of a dialogue with appropriate use of anaphoric forms, such as pronouns and ellipses;

- Generation of turns where information is structured using rhetorical relations, as in the case of recommendations or other persuasive genres;

- Selection and organization of content in a dialogue turn;

- Sentence planning and lexical choice for dialogue interaction;

- Evaluation of language generation for dialogue systems;

- Corpus-based analyses of human-human dialogue to inform NLG for dialogue systems;

- Critical comparison between capabilities of different kinds of models.

- Providing and investigating new resources, such as data sets and tools.

- We also welcome submissions which make use of the new E2E NLG challenge data set (http://www.macs.hw.ac.uk/InteractionLab/E2E/).

* SUBMISSION FORMAT

Long paper submissions will follow the SigDial 2017 format and will be part of the general conference submission and review system. They will be treated as regular SIGDIAL papers and become archival.

- Long papers must be no longer than eight pages + unlimited pages for references + 2 additional pages for appendix (linguistic examples, algorithms etc.)

- Short position papers (2 pages + unlimited pages for references) with a single point to make, e.g. a proposal for a shared task for NLG for dialogue. These will be presented as short talks or posters, and the papers will be added to the web page for the special session (TBA), but will not count as an archival publication.

* IMPORTANT DATES

We will follow the SigDial 2017 schedule, and papers should be submitted using the SIGDIAL conference submission site. http://www.sigdial.org/workshops/conference18/

Paper Submission Deadline: Tuesday, 18 April 2017 (23:59, GMT-11)

Paper Notification: Friday, 9 June 2017

Final Paper Submission: Friday, 7 July 2017

Conference: Tuesday, 15 August 2017 to Thursday, 17 August 2017

* CONTACT

Marilyn Walker

* ORGANISING COMMITTEE

Marilyn Walker, University of California Santa Cruz (Chair)

Verena Rieser, Heriot-Watt University

Vera Demberg, Universität des Saarlandes

Dietrich Klakow, Universität des Saarlandes

Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Google Research

David M. Howcroft, Universität des Saarlandes

Shereen Oraby, University of California Santa Cruz