2024Q3 Reports: SIGDIAL
SIGdial annual report to ACL for 2023-2024
Dilek Hakkani-Tür, 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 421 members. You can find the membership information here: https://www.sigdial.org/membership/. In addition to the mailing list, SIGdial X account has more than 500 followers. Our most recent regular election was held in early 2023, and the current SIGdial officers are: Dilek Hakkani-Tur (President), Milica Gašić (Vice President), Alexandros Papangelis (Secretary) and Casey Kennington (Treasurer). For the Scientific Advisory Board, Stefan Ultes, Kotaro Funakoshi, and Deyi Xiong were elected. Three other members for the board elected by the President are: Asli Celikyilmaz, Jessy Li, and Koichiro Yoshino. Gabriel Skantze is our President Emeritus. The next election is planned in the first half of 2024. 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 2023 was co-organized with INLG, in Prague, between September 11-15. For the first time, the main conference (September 13-15) was preceded by two days of workshops (September 11-12). The organizers of SIGdial 2023 were: David Schlangen (General chair), Svetlana Stoyanchev and Shafiq Joty (Program co-chairs), Ramesh Manuvinakurike (Sponsorship chair), Malihe Alikhani (Publication chair), Ondřej Dušek (local chair), and Casey Kennington (Mentoring chair). The keynote speakers were Barbara Di Eugenio (University of Illinois Chicago), Emmanuel Dupoux (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and Meta AI Labs), Elena Simperl (King’s College London) and Ryan Lowe (OpenAI).
SIGdial 2023 received a total of 136 submissions this year, comprising 87 long papers, 42 short papers, and 7 demo descriptions. 61 papers were accepted in total: 41 long papers (47%), 16 short papers (38%), and 4 demo descriptions, for an overall acceptance rate of 45.5%. In addition, 3 articles from the Dialogue and Discourse journal were selected by the program committee for poster presentations. We gratefully acknowledge the support of our sponsors: LivePerson (Platinum), LuxAI (Platinum) Apple (Gold), Furhat Robotics (Silver), AX Semantics (Bronze), and Bloomberg (Bronze).
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.
SIGdial 2024 will take place in Kyoto, between September 18-20. The organizers of SIGdial 2024 are: Tatsuya Kawahara (General chair), Vera Demberg and Stefan Ultes (Program co-chairs), Shikib Mehri and David Howcroft (Mentoring chairs), Ramesh Manuvinakurike (Sponsorships chair), Kazunori Komatani (Publications chair), Ryuichiro Higashinaka (Publicity chair), Angus Addlesee (Social media chair), Koji Inoue (Local arrangements chair), Divesh Lala, Keiko Ochi, and Mikey Elmers (Local arrangements team).
SIGdial 2025 is planned to be located at Avignon University, August 25-27, with Frederic Bechet and Fabrice Lefevre as the general co-chairs. SIGdial also endorses other dialog-related workshops and events that are open to the general community, such as the Dialogue & Discourse journal.