2012Q3 Reports: SIGDIAL

REPORT ON SIGDIAL ACTIVITIES: June 2011 to June 2012

Tim Paek, SIGDIAL President

SIGDIAL is the ACL and ISCA Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue. More information about SIGDIAL can be found on our newly designed website: http://www.sigdial.org, including an updated calendar of upcoming events, resources, and previous reports. Users can also become members from the website; membership are added to a low-volume, moderated mailing list (mainly conference and job announcements). SIGDIAL is fully compliant with ACL and ISCA guidelines for SIGs.

The current Executive Board members are Tim Paek (President), Amanda Stent (Vice President), and Kristiina Jokinen (Secretary/Treasurer). The Scientific Advisory Board consists of three appointed members: Mikio Nakano, Janyce Wiebe and Jason Williams, and three elected members: Joyce Chai, Matthew Purver, and Ingrid Zukerman. Additional positions are President Emeritus: David Traum, Information officer: Karen Ward, SIG SLUD/JSAI liaison: Yasuhiro Katagiri, ISCA Liaison: Michael Picheny, AVIOS Liaison: Alexander Rudnicky, SIGSEM Liaison: Harry Bunt, SIGGEN Liaison: Sebastian Vargas and IEEE SLT Liaison: Roberto Pieraccini, Mailing List Maintainer: Laurent Romary. In September of this year, both the Executive Board and elected Scientific Advisory Board member positions will be open for election.

SIGDIAL has held an annual workshop on discourse and dialogue since 2000. Due to our steady growth of members, starting in 2009, the SIGDIAL venue became a conference and began to recognize Best Paper awards. The SIGDIAL 2011 was held in Portland, Oregon. The Conference Chairs were Johanna Moore and David Traum. The Technical Program Chairs were Joyce Chai and Rebecca Passoneau. Peter Heeman served as the Local Chair. For 2012, SIGDIAL will be held in Seoul, South Korea, in co-location with ACL 2012 on July 5-6. The Conference Chairs are Gary Geunbae Lee and Jonathan Ginzburg. The Technical Program Chairs are Claire Gardent and Amanda Stent. Minwha CHung is serving as the Local Chair. In keeping with a tradition started in SIGDIAL 2010, papers received mentoring from senior members of the community. Kallirroi Georgila served as Mentoring Chair. Jason Williams served as Sponsorship Chair, securing $7600 from a record number of sponsors: AT&T, AVIOS, Honda Research Institute, Microsoft Research, IBM Research, Korea Telecom, NHN Corporation and Seoul National University. For SIGDIAL 2012, 63 papers were submitted, 40 of which were accepted as long papers, 19 as short papers and 4 as demo papers.

In SIGDIAL 2012, a number of new initiatives were implemented. First, the SIGDIAL Board decided to video-record selected talks and archive them on the web. Toward this effort, we received a generous grant of 1,000 Euros from the ISCA Interspeech 2010 Board. Second, the Executive Board and the Conference Committee decided to fund student travel via the ISCA Student Travel Grant application process. For travel to Seoul Korea, SIGDIAL funded 3 students at $600 each. ISCA also generously funded 3 students.

SIGDIAL 2013 will be help in Lyon, France on or around August 23-24 in co-location with INTERSPEECH 2013. Conference co-Chairs and Technical co-Chairs are pending and will be announced at SIGDIAL 2012.

SIGDIAL also endorses a number of other dialogue-related workshops and events that are open to the general community. The SIGDIAL Endorsed events for the upcoming year are:

• July, 2012: Young Researcher's Roundtable in Spoken Dialogue Systems
• September, 2012: SemDial 2012 : 16th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue: SeineDial
• November, 2012: IWSDS2012 Workshop on "Towards a natural interaction with Robots, Knowbots and Smartphones"