CALL FOR PAPERS
IWSDS 2018: International Workshop on Spoken Dialogue Systems Technology
Place: Singapore
Main Conference Dates: April 18-20, 2018
http://www.colips.org/conferences/iwsds2018/wp/

 
INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP ON SPOKEN DIALOGUE SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY (IWSDS) 2018 invites paper submissions on the following topics:
* Engagement and emotion in human-robot interactions
* Digital resources for interactive applications
* Multi-modal and machine learning methods
* Companions, personal assistants and dialogue systems
* Proactive and anticipatory interactions
* Educational and health-care robot applications
* Dialogue systems and reasoning
* Big data and large scale spoken dialogue systems
* Multi-lingual dialogue systems
* Spoken dialog systems for low-resource languages
* Domain Transfer and adaptation techniques for spoken dialog systems
 
However, submissions are not limited to these topics and submission of papers in all areas of spoken dialogue systems is encouraged. We particularly welcome papers that can be illustrated by a demonstration. As usual, a selection of accepted papers will be published in a book by Springer following the conference (Springer LNEE series, SCOPUS and other important indexes).
 
Authors are requested to submit PDF files of their manuscripts using the paper submission system: https://easychair.org/account/signin.cgi?key=60052599.SUbqoTUuk8bTicqc
 
Paper submission deadline: November 30, 2017
Paper notification deadline: December 29, 2017
 
We distinguish between the following categories of submissions:
 
* Long Research Papers are reserved for reports on mature research results. The expected length of a long paper should be in the range of 8-12 pages, including references.
* Short Research Papers should be in the range of 4-6 pages, including references. Authors may choose this category if they wish to report on smaller case studies or ongoing but interesting and original research efforts.
* Position Papers deal with novel research ideas or view-points which describe trends or fruitful starting points for future research and elicit discussion and are not much researched. They should be 2 pages long, excluding references.
* Demo Submissions ? System Papers: Authors who wish to demonstrate their system may choose this category and provide a description of their system and demo. System papers should not exceed 6 pages in total.
 
In addition, three Special Sessions will be collocated with IWSDS 2018:
 
1.- Empathic dialog systems for elderly assistance
http://www.empathic-iwsds.com/  
 
One of the more important applications of spoken dialog systems (SDS) is the development of personal assistants for elderly. The proposed challenge is to provide personalized advice guidance through a spoken dialogue system to improve the quality of life and independency living status of the people as the age. To this end SDS has to deal not only with user goals but also implement health goals through negotiation strategies to convince the user to develop healthy habits. Such SDS has also include perceived user affective status to support the dialog manager decisions. Important related topics are, but not limited to:

* affective computing in SDS
* user centered design
* policies dealing with shared user-task goals
* management strategies to keep the user engagement
* personalization and adaptation
* ontologies and knowledge representation
* privacy preserved SDS
* simulated dialog manager
* applications to assist the elderly
 
2.- Designing humour in human computer interaction with focus on dialogue technology
http://www.colips.org/conferences/iwsds2018/wp/index.php/collocated-sessions/humic-dial-2018/
 
We are welcoming original contributions from a wide range of disciplines, such as human-computer interaction, computational linguistics, artificial intelligence, social robotics, psychology, media, arts etc. * Topics expected include - but are not limited to:
* Computational humour approaches & applications for dialogue technology
* Humorous virtual agents & social robots & chatbots
* Linguistics and non-linguistics challenges in designing humor
* Evaluation approaches for humorous interactions
* Cultural and social norms for appropriate humorous interactions
 
3.- Third Workshop on Chatbots and Conversational Agent Technologies (WOCHAT 2018)
http://workshop.colips.org/wochat/@iwsds2018/  
 
Although chat-oriented dialogue systems have been around for many years, they have been recently gaining a lot of popularity in both research and commercial arenas. From the commercial stand point, chat-oriented dialogue seems to be providing an excellent means to engage users for entertainment purposes, as well as to give a more human-like appearance to established vertical goal-oriented dialogue systems.
This workshop invites original research contributions on all aspects of chat-oriented dialogue, including closely related areas such as knowledge representation and reasoning, language generation, and natural language understanding, among others. In this sense the workshop will invite for both long and short paper submissions in areas including (but not restricted to):

* Chat-oriented dialogue systems
* Data collections and resources
* Information extraction
* Natural language understanding
* General domain knowledge representation
* Common sense and reasoning
* Natural language generation
* Emotion detection and generation
* Sense of humour detection and generation
* Chat-oriented dialogue evaluation
* User studies and system evaluation
* Multimodal human-computer interaction