2018Q3 Reports: SIGDIAL
SIGdial annual report to ACL for 2017-2018
Jason D Williams, SIGdial President
SIGdial is the ACL and ISCA Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialog. More information about SIGdial can be found on our website: http://www.sigdial.org. Users can also become members from the website; members 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, and currently has 581 members.
Our most recent regular election was held in early 2017, and elected Jason D. Williams (president), Kallirroi Georgila (Vice President), and Ethan Selfridge (Treasurer). In 2017, a by-election was held to fill the position of Secretary and an open board seat. Vikram Ramanarayanan was elected Secretary. Gabriel Skantze was elected to the Scientific Advisory Board, and joins Milica Gasic, Barbara Di Eugenio, Annie Louis, Kai Yu, and Ryuchiro Higashinaka. Amanda Stent is our President Emeritus and also administers the SIGdial website and mailing list. We also have liaisons to a variety of other groups, including IUI, ISCA, AVIOS, SIGGEN, IEEE, etc.
SIGdial has held an annual workshop on discourse and dialog since 2000; the workshop became a conference in 2009. SIGDIAL 2017 was held in Saarbrucken, Germany, in “near co-location” with ACL 2017. SIGDIAL 2017 included three special sessions, on Negotiation Dialog, Chatbots and Conversational Agents, and Natural Language Generation for Dialog Systems. The organizers were: Kristiina Jokinen and Manfred Stede (general chair), Annie Louis and David DeVault (program co-chairs), Ivana Kruijff-Korbayova and Volha Petukhova (local co-chairs), Pierre Lison (mentoring chair) and Ethan Selfridge (sponsorship chair). The keynote speakers were Oliver Lemon, Elisabeth Andre, and Andrew Kehler. SIGDIAL 2017 received a total of 113 submissions, and accepted 29 long papers, 11 short papers, and 7 demonstrations. 18 of the long papers were presented as talks; the remaining long papers and all short papers were presented as posters. We thank the SIGDIAL 2017 sponsors, including Interactions, Microsoft, Maluuba, Adobe Research, Amazon, DFKI, Facebook, Honda Research Institute, PARC, ETS, Charamel GmbH, and SemVox. We also thank Universitat des Saarlandes and its Spoken Languages Systems Group for their generous support. As is now SIGDIAL tradition, we video-record oral presentations with permission of the presenters and archived these online (https://www.superlectures.com/sigdial2017/).
Since 2005, the Young Researchers’ Roundtable on Spoken Dialog Systems (YRRSDS) has been co-located with SIGDIAL, and starting in 2016 YRRSDS officially became the second annual event of SIGdial. YRRSDS is organized by early-stage researchers, and experiments with innovating meeting formats. YRRSDS 2017 was attended by approximately 30 early-stage researchers. https://sites.google.com/site/2017yrrsds/
SIGDIAL 2018 will be held in Melbourne, Australia, 12-14 July, co-located with ACL. The organizers of SIGDIAL 2018 are: Kazunori Komatani (General Chair), Diane Litman and Kai Yu (program co-chairs), Lawrence Cavedon (local chair), Mikio Nakano (Sponsorship chair), and Alexander Papangelis (mentoring chair). Planning for SIGDIAL 2019 is underway now.
SIGdial also endorses other dialog-related workshops and events that are open to the general community. In 2017-2018 we endorsed IWSDS 2018, the journal Dialogue & Discourse, and the DialPort initiative.