2021Q3 Reports: SIGDIAL

SIGdial annual report to ACL for 2020-2021

Gabriel Skantze, 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 2021, and elected Gabriel Skantze (President), Milica Gašić (Vice President), Alexandros Papangelis(Secretary) and Ethan Selfridge (Treasurer). For the Scientific Advisory Board, Seokhwan Kim, Casey Kennington, and Kotaro Funakoshi were elected. The President is in the process of appointing three other members for the board. Jason Williams is our President Emeritus and Amanda Stent administers the SIGdial mailing list. We have recently appointed a new social media person, María Leonor Pacheco, and a webmaster, Bram Willemsen. A new website is under construction and will be released during 2021, with a new design and a new resource portal. 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 2020 was supposed to be held in Boise, USA, co-located with ACL 2020 in Seattle. However, due to the covid situation, it had to be held online as a virtual conference, with no registsration fees. The organizers of SIGDIAL 2020 were: Olivier Pietquin (General Chair), Smaranda Muresan and Vivian Chen (program co-chairs), Casey Kennington (local/virtual chair), David Vandyke (Sponsorship chair), and Nina Dethlefs (mentoring chair). The keynote speakers were Asli Celikyilmaz (Microsoft Research), Diane Litman (University of Pittsburgh), and Gabriel Skantze (KTH). SIGDIAL 2020 included one special session on Special Session on Situated Dialogue with Virtual Agents and Robots.

SIGDIAL 2020 received a total of 104 submissions. We accepted 41 papers: 23 long papers, 10 short papers, and 8 demo descriptions. These numbers give an overall acceptance rate of 39%. The acceptance rate for long papers (37%) and short papers (31%) remains in line with the acceptance rate from last year. For the first time, the reviWe thank the SIGDIAL 2020 sponsors, including Apple, Rasa, Tishiba, and Honda Research Institute. The presentations are archived on Youtube.

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 2020 was attended by approximately 30 early-stage researchers.

SIGDIAL 2021 was originally planned to be held in Singapore, co-located with ACL in Bangkok, July 29-31. However, due to the covid situation, it will be a hybrid event. Due to the travel restrictions, only local people from Singapore are expected to be there in person, and the rest join online (with a small registration fee). The organizers of SIGDIAL 2020 are: Haizhou Li (General and Local Chair), Gina-Anne Levow and Zhou Yu (program co-chairs), David Vandyke (Sponsorship chair), Jessy Li (Publication chair), and Nina Dethlefs (mentoring chair).

Planning for SIGDIAL 2022 is underway.

SIGdial also endorses other dialog-related workshops and events that are open to the general community. In 2020-2021 we endorsed IWSDS 2020 and the journal Dialogue & Discourse.