2nd CALL FOR PAPERS (updated with submission link, important date change, special session links, and keynote speaker list)

SIGDIAL 2018 CONFERENCE July 12-14, 2018

http://www.sigdial.org/workshops/conference19/

The 19th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL 2018) will be held at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia, July 12-14, 2018.  SIGDIAL will be co-located with ACL 2018 which will be held July 15-20 at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre. 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 eighteen 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. 

Keynote Speakers:  Mari Ostendorf, Manfred Stede, Ingrid Zukerman

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  Rhetorical and coherence relations, discourse parsing and discourse connectives. Reference resolution. Event representation and causality in narrative. Argument mining. Quality and style in text. Cross-lingual discourse analysis. Discourse issues in applications such as machine translation, text summarization, essay grading, question answering, and information retrieval.

• Dialogue Systems Open domain, task oriented dialogue and chat systems. Knowledge graphs and dialogue. Dialogue state tracking and policy learning. Social and emotional intelligence. Dialogue issues in virtual reality and human-robot interaction. Entrainment, alignment and priming. Generation for dialogue. Style, voice, and personality. Spoken, multi-modal, embedded, situated, and text/web based dialogue systems, their components, evaluation and applications. 

• Corpora, Tools and Methodology Corpus-based and experimental work on discourse and dialogue, including supporting topics such as annotation tools and schemes, crowdsourcing, evaluation methodology and corpora.
• Pragmatic and/or Semantic Modeling The pragmatics and/or semantics of discourse and dialogue (i.e. beyond a single sentence).

• Applications of Dialogue and Discourse Processing Technology

SPECIAL SESSIONS  SIGDIAL 2018 will include two special sessions: 
• Conversational Approaches to Information Search, Retrievals, and Presentation

• Physically Situated Dialogue Please see the individual special session pages for additional information and submission details.

In order for papers submitted to special sessions to appear in the SIGDIAL conference proceedings, they must undergo the regular SIGDIAL review process.

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. One additional page is allowed for example discourses or dialogues and algorithms.

• Demo descriptions should be no longer than four pages including title, text, examples, figures, tables and references. A separate one-page document should be provided to the program co-chairs for demo descriptions, specifying furniture and equipment needed for the demo.

 Authors are encouraged to also submit additional accompanying materials such as corpora (or corpus examples), demo code, videos, sound files, etc. Multiple Submissions: Papers that have been or will be submitted to other meetings or publications must provide this information (see submission link). SIGDIAL 2018 cannot accept work for publication or presentation that will be (or has been) published elsewhere. Any questions regarding submissions can be sent to programchairs[at]sigdial.org.

Blind Review: Building on last year’s move to anonymous long and short paper submissions, SIGDIAL 2018 will follow the new ACL policies for preserving the integrity of double blind review (see author guidelines). Unlike long and short papers, demo descriptions will not be anonymous. Demo descriptions should include the authors’ names and affiliations, and self-references are allowed.  

Submission Format  All long, short, and demonstration submissions must follow the two-column ACL 2018 format. Authors are expected to use the ACL LaTeX style template or Microsoft Word style template from the ACL 2018 conference. Submissions must conform to the official ACL 2018 style guidelines, which are contained in these templates. Submissions must be electronic, in PDF format. Submission Link and Deadlines You have to fill in the submission form in the START system and upload a pdf of your paper before the March 11 deadline. Updates of a final pdf file will be permitted until March 18. The title, authors, abstract and topics submitted on March 11 cannot be changed. https://www.softconf.com/i/sigdial2018/

IMPORTANT NOTE: ADOPTION OF ACL 2018 AUTHOR GUIDELINES

As noted above, SIGDIAL 2018 is adopting the new ACL guidelines for submission and citation for long and short papers. Long and short papers that do not conform to the following guidelines1 will be rejected without review. Preserving Double Blind Review The following rules and guidelines are meant to protect the integrity of double-blind review and ensure that submissions are reviewed fairly. The rules make reference to the anonymity period, which runs from 1 month before the submission deadline up to the date when your paper is either accepted, rejected, or withdrawn.
• You may not make a non-anonymized version of your paper available online to the general community (for example, via a preprint server) during the anonymity period. By a version of a paper we understand another paper having essentially the same scientific content but possibly differing in minor details (including title and structure) and/or in length (e.g., an abstract is a version of the paper that it summarizes). • If you have posted a non-anonymized version of your paper online before the start of the anonymity period, you may submit an anonymized version to the conference. The submitted version must not refer to the non-anonymized version, and you must inform the program chair(s) that a non-anonymized                                                          
 1 From the first ACL 2018 CFP
version exists. You may not update the non-anonymized version during the anonymity period, and we ask you not to advertise it on social media or take other actions that would further compromise double-blind reviewing during the anonymity period. • Note that, while you are not prohibited from making a non-anonymous version available online before the start of the anonymity period, this does make doubleblind reviewing more difficult to maintain, and we therefore encourage you to wait until the end of the anonymity period if possible. Citation and Comparison If you are aware of previous research that appears sound and is relevant to your work, you should cite it even if it has not been peer-reviewed, and certainly if it influenced your own work. However, refereed publications take priority over unpublished work reported in preprints. Specifically: • You are expected to cite all refereed publications relevant to your submission, but you may be excused for not knowing about all unpublished work (especially work that has been recently posted and/or is not widely cited). • In cases where a preprint has been superseded by a refereed publication, the refereed publication should be cited in addition to or instead of the preprint version. Papers (whether refereed or not) appearing less than 3 months before the submission deadline are considered contemporaneous to your submission, and you are therefore not obliged to make detailed comparisons that require additional experimentation and/or in-depth analysis. 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 2018 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
 
Long, Short & Demonstration Paper Submission:  11 March 2018 (23:59, GMT-11)
Long, Short & Demonstration Final PDF Submission:  18 March 2018 (23:59, GMT-11)

Long, Short & Demonstration Paper Notification: 20 April 2018

Final Paper Submission: 13 May 2018 (23:59, GMT-11) Conference: 12-14 July 2018
 
SIGDIAL 2018 ORGANIZING COMMITTEE General Chair:  Kazunori Komatani, Osaka University, Japan
 Program Chairs:  Diane Litman, University of Pittsburgh, USA Kai Yu, Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU), China
 Local Chair:  Lawrence Cavedon, RMIT University, Australia
 Sponsorship Chair:  Mikio Nakano, Honda Research Institute Japan, Japan
 Mentoring Chair:  Alex Papangelis, Toshiba Research, UK SIGdial President: Jason Williams, Microsoft Research, USA  SIGdial Vice President: Kallirroi Georgila, Institute for Creative Technologies, University of Southern California, USA SIGdial Secretary: Vikram Ramanarayanan, Educational Testing Service, USA SIGdial Treasurer: Ethan Selfridge, Interactions Corp, USA

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 CHiME 2018

            5th International Workshop on

Speech Processing in Everyday Environments

         Microsoft, Hyderabad, Sep 7, 2018

          Submission deadline: Aug 3, 2018

  http://spandh.dcs.shef.ac.uk/chime_workshop/

         ----------------------------------------------

NEWS

* Keynote speakers

The workshop will feature two keynote speakers to be announced soon.

* Registration:

Registration will open on June 10. There will be a flat all-inclusive fee of 30 GBP for students and 50 GBP for other attendees. The fee will include buffet lunch, coffee breaks, bus to/from the Interspeech area (subject to availability), and a food/drinks event in the evening of September 7.

Seats are likely to fill up fast. If you plan to attend we recommend registering as early as possible.

* Travel grants:We will provide 8 travel grants of 150 GBP each (including free registration). These grants are meant for students and young scientists (age < 35). Exceptionally, researchers in special situations like unemployment or coming from low income-level countries may also apply. To apply, please send the following documents to chimechallenge@gmail.com by June 4th:- your CV,- a proof of your student status,- a cover letter stating whether you plan to enter the CHiME-5 challenge and/or submit a paper to the workshop.We will notify successful applicants by June 8 and transfer the money after the workshop.

ABOUT THE WORKSHOP

CHiME 2018 will bring together researchers from the fields of computational hearing, speech enhancement, acoustic modelling and machine learning to discuss the robustness of speech processing in everyday environments.

As a focus for discussion, the workshop will host the CHiME-5 Speech Separation and Recognition Challenge. To find out more about the challenge, seehttp://spandh.dcs.shef.ac.uk/chime_challenge/.

PAPER SUBMISSION

Relevant research topics include (but are not limited to):

- training schemes: data augmentation, semi-supervised training,

- speaker localization and beamforming,

- single- or multi-microphone enhancement and separation,

- robust features and feature transforms,

- robust acoustic and language modeling,

- robust speech recognition,

- robust speaker and language recognition,

- robust paralinguistics,

- cross-environment or cross-dataset performance analysis,

- environmental background noise modelling.

Papers reporting evaluation results on the CHiME-5 dataset or on other datasets are both welcome.

IMPORTANT DATES

10th Jun, 2018    Registration opens

3rd Aug, 2018    Extended abstract submission (2 pages)

20th Aug, 2018  Paper notification

7th Sept, 2018   CHiME-5 Workshop

8th Oct, 2018     Final paper (2 to 6 pages)

ORGANISERS

Jon Barker, University of Sheffield

Shinji Watanabe, Johns Hopkins University

Emmanuel Vincent, Inria

LOCAL ORGANISER

Simerpreet Kaur, Microsoft

SPONSORS

Microsoft

SUPPORTED BY

International Speech Communication Association (ISCA)

ISCA Robust Speech Processing SIG

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5th CHiME Speech Separation
                and Recognition Challenge

                Deadline: August 3, 2018

         Workshop: Microsoft, Hyderabad, Sep 7, 2018

        http://spandh.dcs.shef.ac.uk/chime_challenge/
        ----------------------------------------------


Dear colleague,

It gives us great pleasure to announce the official launch of the CHiME-5 Challenge.

CHiME-5 considers the problem of distant-microphone conversational speech recognition in
everyday home environments. Speech material was elicited using a dinner party scenario
with efforts taken to capture data that is representative of natural conversational
speech. Participants may use a single microphone array or multiple distributed arrays.


FORUM

If you are considering participating, please join the CHiME-5 Google group for
discussions and further announcements.
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/chime5/join


MATERIALS

The Challenge website is now live and contains all the information and data that you will
need for participation:
- a detailed description of the challenge scenario and recording conditions,
- real training and development data,
- full instructions for participation and submission.

Baseline software for array synchronization, speech enhancement, and state-of-the-art
speech recognition will be provided on March 12.

If you have a question that isn't answered by the website and you expect other
participants to have the answer or to be interested by the answer, please post it on the
forum. Otherwise, please email us: chimechallenge@gmail.com.

We look forward to your participation.


IMPORTANT DATES

5th March, 2018 ? Training and development set data released
12th March, 2018 ? Baseline recognition system released
10th June, 2018   ?  Workshop registration open
June/July, 2018   ?  Test data released
3rd Aug, 2018   ? Extended abstract and challenge submission deadline
20th Aug, 2018   ?  Author notification
31st August, 2018   ?  Workshop registration deadline
7th Sept, 2018   ?  CHiME-5 Workshop (satellite of Interspeech 2018) and release of
results
8th Oct, 2018   ?  Final paper (2 to 6 pages)


ORGANISERS

Jon Barker, University of Sheffield
Shinji Watanabe, Johns Hopkins University
Emmanuel Vincent, Inria


SPONSORS

Google
Microsoft Research


SUPPORTED BY

International Speech Communication Association (ISCA)
ISCA Robust Speech Processing SIG

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                                 CHiME 2018
             5th International Workshop on
Speech Processing in Everyday Environments

          Microsoft, Hyderabad, Sep 7, 2018

           Submission deadline: Aug 3, 2018

   http://spandh.dcs.shef.ac.uk/chime_workshop/
          ----------------------------------------------


ABOUT THE WORKSHOP

CHiME 2018 will bring together researchers from the fields of computational hearing, speech enhancement, acoustic modelling and machine learning to discuss the robustness of speech processing in everyday environments.

As a focus for discussion, the workshop will host the CHiME-5 Speech Separation and Recognition Challenge. To find out more about the challenge, see http://spandh.dcs.shef.ac.uk/chime_challenge/.


PAPER SUBMISSION

Relevant research topics include (but are not limited to):
- training schemes: data augmentation, semi-supervised training,
- speaker localization and beamforming,
- single- or multi-microphone enhancement and separation,
- robust features and feature transforms,
- robust acoustic and language modeling,
- robust speech recognition,
- robust speaker and language recognition,
- robust paralinguistics,
- cross-environment or cross-dataset performance analysis,
- environmental background noise modelling.

Papers reporting evaluation results on the CHiME-5 dataset or on other datasets are both welcome.


IMPORTANT DATES

3rd Aug, 2018    Extended abstract submission (2 pages)
20th Aug, 2018  Paper notification
7th Sept, 2018   CHiME-5 Workshop
8th Oct, 2018     Final paper (2 to 6 pages)

ORGANISERS

Jon Barker, University of Sheffield
Shinji Watanabe, Johns Hopkins University
Emmanuel Vincent, Inria

LOCAL ORGANISER

Simerpreet Kaur, Microsoft

SPONSORS

Microsoft

SUPPORTED BY

International Speech Communication Association (ISCA)
ISCA Robust Speech Processing SIG 

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Speech Processing in Challenging Environments (SPICE), September 08, 2018, IISc Bangalore, India.
  
URL:  https://spiceworkshop2018.wixsite.com/spice2018

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 Blizzard Challenge Workshop 2018, September 08, 2018, Microsoft, Hyderabad, India.

URL: https://www.synsig.org/index.php/Blizzard_Challenge_2018

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