FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS

SIGDIAL 2019 CONFERENCE

September 11-13, 2019

http://www.sigdial.org/workshops/conference20/

The 20th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL 2019) will be held on September 11-13, 2019 at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden.

SIGDIAL will be temporally co-located with Interspeech 2019, which will be held on September 15-19 in Graz, Austria (https://www.interspeech2019.org). 

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 a series of nineteen 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:  Dan Bohus, Mirella Lapata, Helen Meng

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 or Semantic Modeling
  Pragmatics or semantics of discourse and dialogue (i.e., beyond a single sentence).

• Applications of Dialogue and Discourse Processing Technology

SPECIAL SESSIONS

SIGDIAL 2019 will include two special sessions (TBA).

Please see the individual special session pages (TBA) 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 is allowed for references. Two additional pages are allowed for appendices containing sample discourses/dialogues and algorithms, and an extra page is allowed in the final version to address reviewers’ comments.

• Short papers should be no longer than four pages including title, text, figures and tables. An unlimited number of pages is allowed for references. One additional page is allowed for sample discourses/dialogues and algorithms, and an extra page is allowed in the final version to address reviewers’ comments.

• 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 and sound files.

Multiple Submissions
Papers that have been or will be submitted to other meetings or publications must provide this information (see submission link). SIGDIAL 2019 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.

Blind Review
Building on previous year’s move to anonymous long and short paper submissions, SIGDIAL 2019 will follow the 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 format. Authors are expected to use the LaTeX or Microsoft Word style template from the ACL conference. Submissions must conform to the official ACL style guidelines, which are contained in these templates. Submissions must be electronic, in PDF format.

Submission Link and Deadlines
Authors have to fill in the submission form in the START system and upload a pdf of their paper before the May 19 deadline. Updates of a final pdf file will be permitted until May 19, 23:59 GMT.

https://www.softconf.com/j/sigdial2019/

IMPORTANT NOTE: ADOPTION OF ACL AUTHOR GUIDELINES 

As noted above, SIGDIAL 2019 is adopting the ACL guidelines for submission and citation for long and short papers. Long and short papers that do not conform to the following guidelines will be rejected without review. 

Preserving Double Blind Review
The following rules and guidelines are meant to protect the integrity of the double-blind reviewing process 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) 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 version exists. You may not update the non-anonymized version during the anonymity period, and we ask that you do not 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 double-blind reviewing more difficult to maintain, and we therefore encourage you to wait until the end of the anonymity period if possible.

Citations 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 unpublished work (especially work that has been recently posted 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 three 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 or in-depth analysis.

MENTORING

Acceptable submissions that require language (English) or organizational assistance will be flagged for mentoring, and accepted with a recommendation to revise with the help of 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 2019 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 PDF Submission: 19 May 2019 (23:59, GMT)

• Long, Short & Demonstration Paper Notification: 28 June 2019

• Final Paper Submission: 21 July 2019 (23:59, GMT)

• Conference: 11-13 September, 2019

SIGDIAL 2019 ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

General Chair:

Satoshi Nakamura, Nara Institute of Technology, Japan

Program Chairs:

Ingrid Zukerman, Monash University, Australia

Milica Gasic, Saarland University, Germany

Local Chair:

Gabriel Skantze, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden

Sponsorship Chair:

Mikio Nakano, Honda Research Institute Japan, Japan

Mentoring Chair:

Alexandros Papangelis, Uber AI, USA

Publication Chair

Stefan Ultes, Daimler AG, Germany

Publicity Chair:

Koichiro Yoshino, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan

SIGdial President:

Jason Williams, Apple, USA

SIGdial Vice President:

Kallirroi Georgila, University of Southern California, USA

SIGdial Secretary:

Vikram Ramanarayanan, Educational Testing Service (ETS) Research, USA

SIGdial Treasurer:

Ethan Selfridge, Interactions, USA

SIGdial President Emeritus:

Amanda Stent, Bloomberg, USA