2022Q3 Reports: SIGDIAL

SIGdial annual report to ACL for 2021-2022

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 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 was a hybrid event. Due to the travel restrictions, only local people from Singapore were there in person, and the rest joined online (with a small registration fee). The organizers of SIGDIAL 2021 were: 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). The keynote speakers were Raymond J. Mooney (University of Texas), Jason Weston (Facebook AI), and Julia Hirschberg (Columbia University). SIGDIAL 2021 included two Special Sessions: Summarization of Dialogues and Multi-Party Meetings ("SummDial"), and Safety for E2E Conversational AI ("SafeConvAI").

SIGDIAL 2021 received a total of 142 submissions. We accepted 59 papers: 40 long papers, 15 short papers, and 4 demo descriptions. These numbers give an overall acceptance rate of 41.5%, which is in line with the acceptance rate from last year. We thank the SIGDIAL 2021 sponsors, including LivePerson, Apple, DataBaker, Google, Rasa, Furhat Robotics, and Toshiba. 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 2021 was attended by approximately 30 early-stage researchers.

SIGDIAL 2022 will be a hybrid event, and will take place in Edinburgh, September 7-9. The organizers of SIGDIAL 2022 are: Oliver Lemon (General and Local Chair), Dilek Hakkani-Tur and Jessy Li (program co-chairs), David Vandyke (Sponsorship chair), Malihe Alikhani (Publication chair), and Ondřej Dušek (mentoring chair).

Planning for SIGDIAL 2023 and SIGDIAL 2024 is underway.

SIGdial also endorses other dialog-related workshops and events that are open to the general community. In 2021-2022 we endorsed the journal Dialogue & Discourse.