SECOND CALL FOR PAPERS

SIGDIAL 2021 CONFERENCE

July 29-31, 2021

http://www.sigdial.org/workshops/conference22/

The 22nd Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL 2021) will be held on July 29-31, 2021 in Singapore.

SIGDIAL will be temporally co-located with ACL-IJCNLP 2021, which will be held on August 1-6 in Bangkok, Thailand (https://2021.aclweb.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 twenty 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 CHANGES FROM THE FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS

- Special Sessions

SIGDIAL 2021 will have two special sessions:

  - Safety for E2E Conversational AI
    https://sites.google.com/view/safety4convai/home

  - SummDial: Summarization of Multi-Party Dialogues and Meetings
    https://elitr.github.io/automatic-minuting/summdial.html

Papers submitted for these special sessions as SIGDIAL regular papers will be reviewed in the same way as other SIGDIAL submissions. The submission deadline and the paper format are the same. Please see their websites for details (including different types of paper submissions and deadlines).

- Hybrid Conference

SIGDIAL 2021 is preparing for a hybrid in-person and virtual conference where people can participate online if they want.

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 the 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, multimodal, 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: April 2, 2021 (11:59pm GMT-11)

Long, Short & Demonstration Paper Notification: May 24, 2021

Final Paper Submission: June 8, 2021

Conference: July 29-31, 2021

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 a 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 result; 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 2021 cannot accept work for publication or presentation that will be (or has been) published elsewhere and that has been or will be submitted to other meetings or publications whose review periods overlap with that of SIGDIAL. Any questions regarding submissions can be sent to conference[at]sigdial.org.

Blind Review

SIGDIAL 2021 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. 

https://2021.aclweb.org/calls/papers/#paper-submission-and-templates

Submissions must conform to the official ACL style guidelines, which are contained in these templates. Submissions must be electronic, in PDF format.

Authors have to fill in the submission form in the START system and upload an initial pdf of their papers before the April 2, 2021 deadline (23:59 GMT-11).  Please see the conference website for details.

For special session long and short papers please select the session under ?Submission Type?.

ADOPTION OF ACL AUTHOR GUIDELINES

As noted above, SIGDIAL 2021 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 2021 will include the 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.

General Chair: 

Haizhou Li, National University of Singapore, Singapore

Program Chairs:

Gina-Anne Levow, University of Washington, USA

Zhou Yu, Columbia University, USA

Publication Chair: 

Jessy Li, University of Texas at Austin, USA

Sponsorship Chair:

David Vandyke, Apple, UK

Mentoring Chair:

Nina Dethlefs, University of Hull, UK

Finance Chair: 

Yan Wu, Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore

SIGdial President: 

Gabriel Skantze, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden

SIGdial Vice President:

Mikio Nakano, C4A Research Institute, Japan

SIGdial Secretary:

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

SIGdial Treasurer:

Ethan Selfridge, LivePerson, USA

SIGdial President Emeritus:

Jason Williams, Apple, USA