FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS

SIGDIAL 2020 CONFERENCE

July 1-3, 2020

http://www.sigdial.org/workshops/conference21/

The 21st Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and  Dialogue (SIGDIAL 2020) will be held on July 1-3, 2020 at the Jack’s Urban Meeting Place (JUMP)  in Boise, Idaho, USA.

SIGDIAL will be temporally co-located with ACL 2020, which will  be held on July 5-10 in Seattle, Washington, USA (https://acl2020.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.

IMPORTANT CHANGE FROM PREVIOUS CONFERENCES

Multiple Submission Policy: SIGDIAL no longer accepts papers  that have been or will be submitted to other meetings or publications.

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

- Applications of Dialogue and Discourse Processing Technology

IMPORTANT DATES

• Long, Short & Demonstration Paper Submission: March 6, 2020

• Long, Short & Demonstration Paper Notification:  April 26,  2020 

• Final Paper Submission: May 11, 2020

• Conference: 1-3 July, 2020

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 paper submissions must describe substantial, original, completed and unpublished work. Wherever appropriate, concrete evaluation and analysis should be included. Long papers must be no longer than 8 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 paper submissions must describe original and unpublished work. Please note that a short paper is not a shortened long paper. Instead short papers should have a point that can be made  in a few pages, such as a small, focused contribution; a negative results; or an interesting application nugget. Short papers should be no longer than 4 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

SIGDIAL 2020 cannot accept work for publication or presentation that  will be (or has been) published elsewhere and that have been or will be submitted to other meetings or publications. 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 2020 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.

ADOPTION OF ACL AUTHOR GUIDELINES 

As noted above, SIGDIAL 2020 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 2020 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.

SIGDIAL 2020 ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

General Chair:

Olivier Pietquin, Google AI

Program Chairs:

Smaranda Muresan, Data Science Institute, Columbia University

Yun-Nung (Vivian) Chen, National Taiwan University

Local Chair:

Casey Kennington, Boise State University

Sponsorship Chair:

David Vandyke, University of Cambridge