REPORT ON SIGDIAL ACTIVITIES

SIGdial is the ACL and ISCA Special Interest Group on Discourse and
Dialogue which was formed in November 1997. This report covers the
period from July 2001 to June 2002.

PEOPLE:
The second SIGdial elections were held in the autumn of 2001. As a
result of the elections and subsequent nominations, SIGdial is now
being
run by the following team: President: Laila Dybkjaer; Vice President:
David Traum; Secretary: Jennifer Chu-Carroll; Science Advisory
Committee: Jan Alexandersson, Kristiina Jokinen, Akira Kurematsu,
Alexander Rudnicky, Ronnie Smith, and Jan van Kuppevelt; Information
Officer: Claudia Soria assisted by Kristiina Jokinen, Eric Chang, and
Pamela Jordan; ACL Student Liaison: Weiqun Xu and Holmer Hemsen;
CHI
Liaison: Nils Dahlback; ICSLP/ISCA Liaison: Julia Hirschberg; Mailing
list maintenance: Laurent Romary.
SIGdial has 250 members registered on its membership web page.

WORKSHOP ENDORSEMENT
During the past year several workshops with strong relations to the
SIGdial field of interest have been endorsed by SIGdial. The workshops
endorsed by SIGdial which have taken place within the reported period
include:
July 6-7 2001: ACL-EACL Workshop on Evaluation for Language and
Dialogue
Systems (Toulouse, France).
August 5 2001: 2nd IJCAI Workshop on Knowledge And Reasoning In
Practical Dialogue Systems (Seattle, USA).
August 20-24 2001: ESSLLI Workshop: Information Structure,
Discourse
Structure and Discourse Semantics (Helsinki Finland).
October 22-24 2001: ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop on:
Prosody in
Speech Recognition and Understanding (Red Bank, USA).
June 4 2002: ITS 2002 Workshop on Empirical Methods for Tutorial
Dialogue Systems (San Sebastian, Spain).
June 17-19 2002: ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop on Spoken
Dialogue
in Mobile Environments (Kloster Irsee, Germany).
Workshops which have been endorsed by SIGdial but haven't been
held yet
include:
September 4-6 2002: EDILOG 2002: Sixth Workshop on the Semantics
and
Pragmatics of Dialogue (Edinburgh, Scotland).

SIGDIAL WORKSHOP SERIES
Following the first and successful SIGdial workshop on Discourse and
Dialogue held on 7-8 October 2000 in Hong Kong in conjunction with
ACL'2000, the second SIGdial workshop on Discourse and Dialogue
was held
on 1-2 September 2001 in Aalborg, Denmark, in conjunction with
Eurospeech'2001. This workshop was a very successful event with 90
participants - more than twice as many as participated in the first
SIGdial workshop. The workshop received 57 paper submissions. Of
these
29 were selected for presentation. The online workshop proceedings
are
available at
http://www.sigdial.org/sigdialworkshop01/acceptance_list.php.
Hardcopies
can be bought via ACL. Based on some of the best workshop
submissions a
book is now being edited by the workshop chairs Jan van Kuppevelt
and
Ronnie Smith. The book will be published by Kluwer later this year.
The third SIGdial workshop will take place on 11-12 July in
Philadelphia, USA, in conjunction with ACL'2002. Information on
SIGdial
workshops can be found at http://www.sigdial.org/workshops.php.

WEB
SIGdial has a web site at http://www.sigdial.org. The web site is hosted
by NISLab. Some pages are maintained by a particular person, such as
the
information officer, while other pages are intended to be maintained by
the membership collectively. For instance, the web site enables
members
to easily update their personal information in the membership database.
Also a resource page has been established which members are
encouraged
to collectively maintain by adding references to resources they are
aware of and which may be of interest to the SIGdial community. This
page includes references to e.g. coding schemes, language resources,
spoken dialogue systems, and tools.

OTHER ACTIVITIES
Since autumn 2000 SIGdial has a collaboration with Elsnet, the
European
Language and Speech Network. Elsnet has a quarterly newsletter,
Elsnews,
and Elsnet has generously offered one page in each issue of Elsnews
for
SIGdial purposes. SIGdial contributions in Elsnews can be found in
issue
9.3 and onwards. Elsnews can be freely downloaded in pdf format from
http://www.elsnet.org/elsnews.html. Contributions from the reported
period include
1. Kristiina Jokinen: The USIX Interact Project: Adaptivity in
Dialogue
Systems.
2. Hans Dybkjaer: Stray Thoughts from a Crossroad.
3. Alexander Rudnicky: The DARPA Communicator Programme.
4. Yasuharu Den: Current Research Activities on Discourse and
Dialogue
in Japan.
A flyer on SIGdial was produced for distribution at Eurospeech'2001,
the
2nd SIGdial workshop and the COCOSDA workshop. The flyer is
available
for download in pdf format from www.sigdial.org.
SIGdial has a business meeting each year in connection with the
SIGdial
workshop. Agenda, slides and minutes are available at
http://www.sigdial.org/businessmeetings/