2015Q3 Reports: SIGDIAL

REPORT ON SIGdial ACTIVITIES: June 2014 to June 2015

Amanda Stent, SIGdial President

SIGdial is the ACL and ISCA Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue. More information about SIGdial can be found on our 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.

In April 2015 SIGdial held an election. We thank Ethan Selfridge, Alexandros Papangelis and Stefan Ultes for running the election for us. The newly elected Executive Board members for SIGdial are Amanda Stent (President), Jason Williams (Vice President), and Kristiina Jokinen (Secretary/Treasurer). The Scientific Advisory Board consists of three appointed and three elected members: Barbara Di Eugenio, Maxine Eskenazi, Kazunori Komatani, Gabriel Skantze, Svetlana Stoyanchev and Michael Strube. We thank our previous board members (2013-2015): Luciana Benotti, Raquel Fernandez Rovira, Kazunori Komatani, Matthew Purver, Verena Rieser and David Traum. Additional positions are President Emeritus: Tim Paek, IUI liaison: Candace Sidner, SIG SLUD/JSAI liaison: Yasuhiro Katagiri, ISCA Liaison: Michael Picheny, AVIOS Liaison: Alexander Rudnicky, SIGSEM Liaison: Harry Bunt, SIGGEN Liaison: Verena Rieser, IEEE SLT Liaison: Fabrice Lefevre, and Mailing List Maintainer: Laurent Romary. After more than ten years, Laurent Romary will be stepping down; we thank him very much for his work, due to which the SIGdial mailing list is one of the most useful in CL.

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. SIGDIAL 2014 was held in Philadelphia, in "near co-location" with ACL 2014. In a first, SIGDIAL was held in co-location with INLG and there was a special joint SIGDIAL+INLG session as well as a joint banquet. In addition, there was one SIGDIAL special session, the second Dialog State Tracking Challenge. The general chairs were Kallirroi Georgila and Matthew Stone, and the program chairs were Helen Hastie and Ani Nenkova. The local organizer was Keelan Evanini, ably assisted by a phenomenal team from the Educational Testing Service. The mentoring chair was Svetlana Stoyanchev and the sponsorship chair was Giuseppe Di Fabbrizio. Sponsorships came from the Educational Testing Service, Microsoft Research, Amazon.com, Yahoo! Labs, Honda Research Institute, the Linguistic Data Consortium, Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, the University of Pennsylvania Linguistics Department, AT&T Labs Research, the PARLANCE project and the SENSEI project. For SIGDIAL 2014, 67 papers were submitted (including 4 demo proposals), 30 papers and all 4 demo proposals were accepted, and 9 papers were accepted to the Dialog State Tracking Challenge special session. There were 67 pre-registered attendees to SIGDIAL alone, and an additional 28 pre-registered attendees who registered for both SIGDIAL and INLG. As is now SIGDIAL tradition, we video-recorded oral presentations with permission of the presenters; these were processed by Superlectures.com and are archived online.

SIGdial has noticed that in years when SIGDIAL co-locates with ACL participation is lower, vs. years when SIGDIAL co-locates with INTERSPEECH (and presumably draws more speech scientists). [submissions by year and location: 2014/ACL/US - 67; 2013/INTERSPEECH/Europe - 117; 2012/ACL/Asia - 63; 2011/ACL/US - 76; 2010/INTERSPEECH/Asia - 97; 2009/INTERSPEECH/Europe - 103] The relatively low attendance last year (ACL, US) stands in contrast to the record attendance in the two previous years (INTERSPEECH, Asia and Europe respectively). We anticipate a bounce back in attendance for SIGDIAL 2015 (INTERSPEECH, Europe; and a record 146 submissions). We welcome the input of the ACL exec on how to draw more engagement from the ACL and discourse communities.

SIGDIAL 2015 will be help in Prague on September 2-4, just before INTERSPEECH 2015. The general chairs are Alexander Koller and Gabriel Skantze. The program chairs are Masahiro Araki and Carolyn Penstein-Rose. The local chair is Filip Jurcicek. The mentoring chair is Svetlana Stoyanchev and the sponsorships chair is Kristy Boyer. There is one special session, MultiLing 2015.

SIGDIAL 2016 will be held near INTERSPEECH 2016 in sunny LA at the Institute for Creative Technologies. The general chairs are Wolfgang Minker and Raquel Fernandez. The program chairs are Giuseppe Carenini and Ruichiro Higashinaka. The local organizers are Ron Artstein and Alesia Gainer. The mentoring chair is Pierre Lison. The sponsorships chair is Ethan Selfridge. The organizers will solicit special session proposals in early spring 2016.

SIGdial also endorses a number of other dialogue-related workshops and events that are open to the general community. The SIGdial Endorsed events for 2015 include:

• June 2014: The 3rd Dialog State Tracking Challenge
• January 2015: IWSDS 2015
• September 2015: Young Researcher's Roundtable in Spoken Dialogue Systems
• September 2015: SEMDIAL 2015