CALL FOR PAPERS
RE-WOCHAT: Workshop on Collecting and Generating Resources for Chatbots and Conversational Agents
Development and Evaluation
http://workshop.colips.org/re-wochat/
Workshop Description
Although non goal-oriented dialogue systems have been around for many years (almost fifty years
indeed, if we consider Weizenbaum's Eliza system as the starting milestone), they have been recently
gaining a lot of popularity in both research and commercial arenas. From the commercial stand point,
non goal-oriented dialogue seems to be providing an excellent means to engage users for
entertainment purposes, as well as to give a more human-like appearance to established vertical
goal-oriented dialogue systems.
From the research perspective, on the other hand, this kind of systems poses interesting challenges
and problems to the research community. The main objective of the workshop is to bring together
researchers working on problems related to chat-oriented dialogue for promoting discussion and
knowledge sharing about the state-of-the-art and novel techniques in this field, as well as to
coordinate a collaborative effort to collect/generate data, resources and evaluation protocols for
future research in this area.
Topics of Interest
This workshop invites original research contributions on all aspects of non goal-oriented dialogue,
including closely related areas such as knowledge representation and reasoning, language generation,
and natural language understanding, among others. In this sense the workshop will invite for both
long and short paper submissions in areas including (but not restricted to):
* Chat-oriented dialogue systems
* Data collections and resources
* Information extraction
* Natural language understanding
* General domain knowledge representation
* Common sense and reasoning
* Natural language generation
* Emotion detection and generation
* Sense of humour detection and generation
* Chat-oriented dialogue evaluation
* User studies and system evaluation
* Multimodal human-computer interaction
Shared Task on Collecting Resources for Chat-oriented Dialogue
As part of RE-WOCHAT program activities, a shared task on data collection and annotation will be
conducted. In this task, participants will generate human-machine and human-human dialogues and
annotate them. Human-machine dialogues will be generated by using different online and offline chat
engines, and annotations are to be generated following a provided set of guidelines. The collected
dataset will be made publicly available to the research community for further research and
experimentation in future editions of the workshop.
For more information about the shared task and how to participate in it please visit:
http://workshop.colips.org/re-wochat/shared.html
Paper Format and Submissions
Paper submissions to RE-WOCHAT should follow the LREC 2016 paper submission policy. In accordance
with LREC policy, papers are not required to be anonymous. Both full papers (8 pages) and short
papers (4 pages) are welcomed. Paper submission link: https://www.softconf.com/lrec2016/RE-WOCHAT/
Important Dates
February 22, 2016: Paper Submission Deadline
March 10, 2016: Paper Acceptance Notification
March 24, 2016: Camera Ready Version Deadline
Share your LRs! Initiative and ISLRN Number:
Describing your LRs in the LRE Map is now a normal practice in the submission procedure of LREC
(introduced in 2010 and adopted by other conferences). To continue the efforts initiated at LREC
2014 about "Sharing LRs" (data, tools, web-services, etc.), authors will have the possibility, when
submitting a paper, to upload LRs in a special LREC repository. This effort of sharing LRs, linked
to the LRE Map for their description, may become a new "regular" feature for conferences in our
field, thus contributing to creating a common repository where everyone can deposit and share data.
As scientific work requires accurate citations of referenced work so as to allow the community to
understand the whole context and also replicate the experiments conducted by other researchers, LREC
2016 endorses the need to uniquely Identify LRs through the use of the International Standard
Language Resource Number (ISLRN, www.islrn.org), a Persistent Unique Identifier to be assigned to
each Language Resource. The assignment of ISLRNs to LRs cited in LREC papers will be offered at
submission time.
Program Committee Members
* Bj‡rn Schuller, Imperial College London, UK
* David Suendermann, Educational Testing Service (ETS), USA
* Diane Litman, University of Pittsburgh, USA
* Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Microsoft Research, USA
* Gabriel Skantze, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
* Haizhou Li, Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore
* Jason Williams, Microsoft Research, USA
* Jiang Ridong, Agency for Science, Technology and Research, Singapore
* Justine Cassell, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
* Kristiina Jokinen, University of Helsinki, Finland
* Kotaro Funakoshi, Honda Research Institute, Japan
* Laurence Devillers, LIMSI-CNRS, France
* Luis D'Haro, Agency for Science, Technology and Research, Singapore
* Luisa Coheur, Lisbon University, Portugal
* Matthew Henderson, Google Research, USA
* Michael McTear, University of Ulster, UK
* Mikio Nakano, Honda Research Institute, Japan
* Nick Campbell, Trinity College Dublin, Irland
* Oliver Lemon, Heriot-Watt University, UK
* Ram♭n L♭pez-C♭zar, University of Granada, Spain
* Sakriani Sakti, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan
* Satoshi Nakamura, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan
* Seokhwan Kim, Agency for Science, Technology and Research, Singapore
* Sophie Rosset, LIMSI-CNRS, France
* Stefan Ultes, Cambridge University, UK
* Suraj Nair, Technische Universit∽t M◯nchen, Germany
* Teruhisa Misu, Honda Research Institute, USA
* Tomoki Toda, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan
* Yasuharo Den, Chiba University, Japan
* Shiv Vitaladevuni, Amazon, USA
Shared Task Co-organizers
* Bayan Abu Shawar, Arab Open University, Jordan
* Luis Fernando D'Haro, Agency for Science, Technology and Research, Singapore
Workshop Organizers
* Rafael E. Banchs, Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore
* Ryuichiro Higashinaka, NTT Media Intelligence Laboratories, Nippon telegraph and telephone corporation, Japan
* Wolfgang Minker, Institute of Communications Engineering, Ulm University, Germany
* Joseph Mariani, Institute for Multilingual and Multimedia Information (IMMI) & LIMSI-CNRS, France
* David Traum, University of Southern California, Institute for Creative Technologies, USA