2014Q3 Reports: SIGDIAL

REPORT ON SIGdial ACTIVITIES: June 2013 to June 2014

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.

The current 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: Luciana Benotti, Raquel Fernandez Rovira, Kazunori Komatani, Matthew Purver, Verena Rieser, 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.

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 2013 was held was held in Metz, France, in "near co-location" with INTERSPEECH 2013. The General Chairs were Maxine Eskenazi and Michael Strube, and the Program Chairs were Jason Williams and Barbara Di Eugenio. The local organizer was Olivier Pietquin. The Mentoring Chair was Kallirroi Georgila and the Sponsorship Chair was Amanda Stent. Sponsorships came from Amazon, Apple, AT&T, the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies (HITS), HRI, La Region Lorraine, Microsoft Research, Nuance, Samsung and Supelec. For SIGDIAL 2013, 98 papers and 17 demo proposals were submitted, and 57 papers and 14 demo proposals were accepted. There were 115 pre-registered attendees. For the second year in a row, we video-recorded oral presentations with permission of the presenters; these were processed by Superlectures.com and are archived online. We also provided two student bursaries of $600 each. SIGDIAL 2013 featured a new initiative, special sessions. The main SIGDIAL conference is single-track, takes place over two days, and features peer reviewed papers and invited talks. Special sessions take place on the third day, may take place in parallel, and are more flexible in structure - they are intended to accommodate, for example, shared tasks in dialog and discourse. At SIGDIAL 2013 there was one special session for the first Dialog State Tracking Challenge.

SIGDIAL 2014 will be help in Philadelphia, PA on June 18-20, just before ACL 2014. The General Chairs are Matthew Stone and Kallirroi Georgila. The Program Chairs are Helen Hastie and Ani Nenkova. The Local Chair is Keelan Evanini. The Mentoring Chair is Svetlana Stoyanchev and the Sponsorships Chair is Giuseppe Di Fabbrizio. Sponsors include Amazon, AT&T, the Educational Testing Service (ETS), HRI, the LDC, Microsoft Research, Mitsubishi Electric, the Parlance and SENSEI projects, the University of Pennsylvania, and Yahoo Labs. There is one special session for the second Dialog State Tracking Challenge. SIGDIAL 2014 is held in colocation and collaboration with INLG 2014, and there is a joint session between the two conferences, to be held on the afternoon of June 19. This joint session features oral presentations and posters. The banquet will be held jointly with INLG just after the joint session.

SIGDIAL 2015 will be held just before INTERSPEECH 2015. The General Chairs are Alexander Koller and Gabriel Skantze and the Program Chairs are Carolyn Penstein Rose and Masahiro Araki.

SIGdial also endorses a number of other dialogue-related workshops and events that are open to the general community. The SIGdial Endorsed events for 2014 include:

  - January 2014:  IWSDS

-- June 2014: Young Researcher's Roundtable in Spoken Dialogue Systems -- June 2014: The 2nd Dialog State Tracking Challenge -- June 2014: The REAL Challenge -- September 2014: SEMDIAL (DialWatt)

In the fall of 2014 the SIGdial board will discuss and then SIGdial will hold a vote on proposed constitutional amendments including adding to the executive board a treasurer. In the spring of 2015 SIGdial will hold an election.