2020Q3 Reports: SIGDIAL
SIGdial annual report to ACL for 2019-2020
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 2019, and elected Gabriel Skantze (President), Mikio Nakano (Vice President), Vikram Ramanarayanan (Secretary) and Ethan Selfridge (Treasurer). For the Scientific Advisory Board, Ryuichiro Higashinaka, Junyi Jessy Li, and Casey Kennington were elected. The President also appointed Barbara Di Eugenio, Annie Louis and Raquel Fernandez for the board. Jason Williams is our President Emeritus and Amanda Stent administers the SIGdial website and mailing list. 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 2019 was held in Stockholm, Sweden, co-located with Interspeech 2019. SIGDIAL 2019 included one special session on Physically Situated Dialogue. The organizers were: Satoshi Nakamura (general chair), Milica Gasic and Ingrid Zukerman (program co-chairs), Gabriel Skantze (local chair), Alex Papangelis (mentoring chair) and Mikio Nakano (sponsorship chair). The keynote speakers were Dan Bohus, Mirella Lapata, and Helen Meng. SIGDIAL 2019 received a total of 146 submissions, and accepted 51 papers: 33 long papers, 13 short papers, and 5 demo papers. These numbers give an overall acceptance rate of 35%. The rates separately for types of papers are 35% for long papers, 30% for short papers, and 50% for demo papers. 19 long papers were presented as talks; the remaining long papers and all short papers were presented as posters. We thank the SIGDIAL 2019 sponsors, including Honda Research Institute, Microsoft, Interactions, Amazon Alexa, Apple, Rasa Technologies, ETS, Toshiba Research Europe, and Monash University. As is now SIGDIAL tradition, we video-record oral presentations with permission of the presenters and archived these online (https://www.superlectures.com/sigdial2018/).
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 2019 was attended by approximately 30 early-stage researchers.
SIGDIAL 2020 was originally planned to be held in Boise, USA, 1-3 July, in “near co-location” with ACL in Seattle. Due to the Corona situation, the conference will instead be virtual, with no registration fees. The organizers of SIGDIAL 2020 are: 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). Planning for SIGDIAL 2021 is underway now, with the location set to Singapore, close in time to ACL 2021 in Bangkok.
SIGdial also endorses other dialog-related workshops and events that are open to the general community. In 2019-2020 we endorsed IWSDS 2019 and the journal Dialogue & Discourse.