The 1st Workshop on Conversational Interaction Systems (WCIS)

=== Call for Papers ===

You are invited to participate in the 1st Workshop on Conversational Interaction Systems (WCIS), to be held as part of 42nd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2019) in Paris, France on 25th July 2019.

=== Important Dates ===

- Submissions due: May 3, 2019

- Paper Notification: May 31, 2019

- Camera Ready Papers due: June 30, 2019

- Workshop Day: July 25, 2019

=== Aim of the Workshop ===

Conversational interaction systems such as Alexa, Google Assistant, Siri, and Cortana have become very popular over the recent years. Such systems provide a conversational interface to a wide variety of content and on the web and in turn for IR systems. Some interactive systems like Facebook Portal and Echo Show also involve challenges with language understanding in combination with vision. Research challenges such as Dialogue System Technology Challenges and Amazon Alexa Prize have continued to inspire research in conversational AI bringing together researchers from different communities such as speech recognition, spoken language understanding, reinforcement learning, information retrieval, language generation, and multi-modal question answering.

This workshop aims to bring together researchers from academia and industry to discuss the challenges and future of conversational agents and interactive systems. We will highlight applications like recommendation systems, search, knowledge graph induction, multi-modal interaction and web question answering. The workshop will include talks from senior technical leaders and researchers to share insights associated with building conversational systems at scale. We will issue an open call for papers and will prioritize innovative and impactful contributions. Accepted papers will be presented through contributed talks or poster presentations. We will end the workshop with an open panel discussion consisting of leading researchers.

=== Workshop Topics ===

We invite contributions in the following areas:

• End to end approaches for multi-turn dialog and retrieval systems

• Reinforcement and imitation learning for dialog and retrieval systems

• Dialog systems:

• Speech recognition

• Language understanding

• Dialog manager and state tracking

• Language generation and dialog evaluation

• Conversational approaches for information retrieval:

  • Knowledge grounding

  • Multi-turn interactions for addressing complex queries

  • Conversational recommendation systems and personalization

  • Surfacing and realization of search results

• Visual dialog and question answering

• Human-human, human-machine and multi-modal interactions

• Usability, interpretability and explain ability of conversational AI and IR models

• User modeling, user context, and personalization

• Dialog datasets and innovative data collection techniques

=== Submission Information ===

The submissions of research papers must be in PDF format and must be at most 6 pages (including figures, excluding references). The submissions should follow the current ACM two-column conference format. The templates are available on the ACM website (https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template). Please note that our workshop is non-archival, but accepted submissions will be hosted on the workshop website. Submissions can be optionally anonymous (posting on arXiv is allowed) and should be submitted electronically via the conference submission system by the due date.

Workshop Website: https://sites.google.com/view/wcis

Submission Link : https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=wcis2019

Templates : https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template

=== Organizing Committee ===

- Chandra Khatri, Uber AI

- Rahul Goel, Amazon Alexa AI

- Abhinav Rastogi, Google AI

- Alexandros Papangelis, Uber AI

Advisory Committee -

Dilek Hakkani-Tur (Amazon Alexa AI), Rushin Shah (Facebook Conversational AI), Gokhan Tur (Uber AI), Zhou Yu (UC Davis), Arindam Mandal (Amazon Alexa AI), Jan Sedivy (Czech Technical University), Panagiotis Papadakos (FORTH -ICS), Raefer Gabriel (Amazon Alexa AI)

Program Committee -

Semih Yavuz (University of California, Santa Barbara), Alessandra Cervone (University of Trento), Angeliki Metanillou (Amazon Alexa AI), Bhenam Hedayatnia (Amazon Alexa AI), Sanghyun Yi (Caltech), Huaixiu Zheng (Uber AI), Marco Damonte (University of Edinburgh), Tagyoung Chung (Amazon Alexa AI), Raghav Gupta (Google AI), Tanmay Rajpurohit (Genpact AI), Dian Yu (UC Davis), Pararth Shah (Facebook AI)

Thanks!

Abhinav, Chandra, Rahul, Alex