2023Q3 Reports: SIGDIAL

SIGdial annual report to ACL for 2022-2023

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 2023, and elected Dilek Hakkani-Tur (President), Milica Gašić (Vice President), Alexandros Papangelis(Secretary) and Casey Kennington (Treasurer). For the Scientific Advisory Board, Stefan Ultes, Kotaro Funakoshi, and Deyi Xiong were elected. The President is in the process of appointing three other members for the board. Gabriel Skantze is our President Emeritus. 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 2022 was held in Edinburgh, September 7-9, also allowing remote participation. The organizers of SIGDIAL 2022 were: 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). The keynote speakers were Vivian Chen (National Taiwan University), Angeliki Lazaridou (DeepMind), and Giuseppe Carenini (University of British Columbia). SIGDIAL 2022 included one Special Session: Natural Language in Human Robot Interaction (NLiHRI).

SIGDIAL 2022 received a total of 140 submissions. We accepted 64 papers: 37 long papers, 19 short papers, and 8 demo descriptions. These numbers give an overall acceptance rate of 45.7%, which is in line with the acceptance rate from last year. We thank the SIGDIAL 2022 sponsors, including LivePerson, Apple, Alana, Toshiba, and Furhat Robotics. 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 2022 was attended by approximately 30 early-stage researchers.

SIGDIAL 2023 will be co-organized with INLG 2023 and will take place in Prague, September 11-15. For the first time, the main conference (September 13-15) will be preceded by two days of workshops (September 11-12). The organizers of SIGDIAL 2023 are: David Schlangen (General Chait), Ondřej Dušek (Local Chair), Svetlana Stoyanchev and Shafiq Joty (program co-chairs), Ramesh Manuvinakurike (Sponsorship chair), Malihe Alikhani (Publication chair), and Casey Kennington (mentoring chair).

SIGDIAL 2024 is planned to be located at Kyoto University, September 17-20, with Tatsuya Kawahara as General chair.

SIGdial also endorses other dialog-related workshops and events that are open to the general community. In 2022-2023 we endorsed the journal Dialogue & Discourse.