2016Q3 Reports: SIGDIAL

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. 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 2015-2017 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. Additional positions are President Emeritus: Tim Paek, IUI liaison: Candace Sidner, SIG SLUD/JSAI liaison: Yasuhiro Katagiri, ISCA Liaison: Gerard Bailly, 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; the workshop became a conference in 2009. SIGDIAL 2015 was held in Prague, in "near co-location" with INTERSPEECH 2015. SIGDIAL was, as has been the case since at least 2007, preceded by the Young Researchers’ Roundtable on Spoken Dialog Systems. There were two parallel special sessions: MultiLing 2015 and an open session. The organizers were: Alexander Koller and Gabriel Skantze (general chairs), Masahiro Araki and Carolyn Penstein-Rose (program co-chairs), Filip Jurcicek (local chair), Svetlana Stoyanchev (mentoring chair) and Kristy Boyer (sponsorships chair). The keynote speakers were Frank Fischer and Dilek Hakkani-Tur. Of the 79 long paper submissions: 14 were accepted as long papers for oral presentation, 21 were accepted as long papers for poster presentation. Of the 42 short paper submissions, 17 were accepted for poster presentation, for a total of 38 posters. There were 7 demonstration papers that were accepted. We thank the SIGDIAL 2015 sponsors, including the Educational Testing Service (ETS) Microsoft Resarch, Honda Research Institute (HRI), Interactions, Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, and Turnitin/LightSide. As is now SIGDIAL tradition, we video-recorded oral presentations with permission of the presenters and archived these online.

SIGdial has noticed that in years when SIGDIAL co-locates with ACL participation is considerably lower, vs. years when SIGDIAL co-locates with INTERSPEECH (15-40% depending on year and location). We welcome the input of the ACL exec on how to draw more engagement from the ACL and discourse communities. SIGDIAL 2016 will be held at ICT/USC, Los Angeles, CA, USA from Sept 13-16, 2016, in "near colocation" with INTERSPEECH 2016. The organizers are: Raquel Fernandez and Wolfgang Minker (general chairs), Giuseppe Carenini and Ryuichiro Higashinaka (program co-chairs for discourse and dialogue respectively), Ron Artstein and Alesia Gainer (local chairs), Pierre Lison (mentoring chair) and Ethan Selfridge (sponsorships chair).

SIGdial also endorses a number of other dialogue-related workshops and events that are open to the general community. The SIGdial Endorsed events for 2015-16 include: IWSDS 2016, YRRSDS 2015, DSTC5, the RE-WOCHAT LREC Workshop 2016, Jersem (SemDial 2016), and IWSDS 2017. There is ongoing sponsorship of Dialogue & Discourse and ongoing endorsement of DialPort.

In 2017 SIGdial will hold an election.