2010Q3 Reports: SIGDIAL
REPORT ON SIGDIAL ACTIVITIES: June 2009 to June 2010
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.
An election of officers and three advisory board members was held in Spring of 2008 for a 2 year term. SIGDIAL is currently led by officers Tim Paek (President), Amanda Stent (Vice President), and Kristiina Jokinen (Secretary), and Science Advisory Committee members Mikio Nakano, Michael McTear, David Schlangen, Candace Sidner, Janyce Wiebe and Jason Williams. 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. A new election will be held this year for all elected positions.
SIGDIAL has held an annual workshop on discourse and dialogue since 2000. During a business meeting at the SIGDIAL workshop in 2008, the Executive Board and all attending members voted to make SIGDIAL 2009 a conference. As such, in 2009, SIGDIAL organized it's first conference in September 11-12, 2009, at Queen Mary University of London, just after the Interspeech 2009 conference. The Conference Chairs were Pat Healy and Roberto Pieraccini. The Technical Program Chairs were Donna Byron and Steve Young, and Matthew Purver served as the Local Chair. 103 papers were submitted, 24 of which were accepted as full papers, 24 as poster papers and 3 as demo papers. Upon inaugurating the venue as a conference, a new tradition was started, the recognition of a Best Paper Award and a Best Student Paper Award.
The next workshop will be in September 24-25, 2010 at University of Tokyo, Japan. It will be co-located with Interspeech 2010. The Conference Chairs will be Yasuhiro Katagiri and Mikio Nakano. The Technical Program Chairs will be Oliver Lemon and Raquel Fernandez. The Call for Papers ended at May 14, 2010. 98 papers were submitted. As a new initiative, reviewers for SIGDIAL 2010 can mark papers as suitable for mentoring, in which case, a volunteer, senior member of the SIGDIAL community will work with the authors to prepare the paper for publication. More information about this initiative as well as other details of the conference can be found at: http://www.sigdial.org/workshops/workshop11/
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:
- June, 2010: Third Workshop on Question Generation
- June, 2010: 14th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue
- July, 2010: Second NLG Challenge on Generating Instructions in Virtual Environments (GIVE)
- September, 2010: 5th Workshop on Speech in Mobile and Pervasive Environments
- September, 2010: Young Researcher's Roundtable in Spoken Dialogue Systems
- Novemember, 2010: AAAI Fall Symposium on "Dialog with Robots"