REPORT ON SIGDIAL ACTIVITIES: July 2003 to June 2004

David Traum (with material from past president Laila Dybkjaer)

SIGdial is the ACL and ISCA Special Interest Group on Discourse and
Dialogue which was formed in November 1997.  More information about
SIGdial can be found on the webpages: http://www.sigdial.org including
a calendar of upcoming events, resources, and previous
reports. Members can join from the webpage, which includes
participation in a low-volume, moderated mailing list (mainly
conference and job announcements).  Sigdial currently has over 350
members from 28 countries.


This has been a transition year for Sigdial leadership, with elections
in 2003 (taking effect in 2004), and change in Presidents and many
other positions. The current board includes officers David Traum
(President), Wolfgang Minker (Vice President), and Kristiina Jokinen
(Secretary), and Science Advisory Committee members Jan Alexandersson,
Susan McRoy, Michael McTear, Alexander Rudnicky, Jan van Kuppevelt,
and Ronnie Smith. Additional positions are President Emeritus: Laila
Dybkjaer, Information officer: Karen Ward, SIG SLUD/JSAI liaison: Syun
Tutiya, ISCA Liaison: Rolf Carlson, Student Liaisons: Holmer Hemsen,
Dan Bohus, and Kotaro Funakoshi, Mailing List Maintainer: Laurent
Romary.

Sigdial has held an annual workshop on discourse and dialogue since
2000. In July 2003, the 4th workshop was held in Sapporo Japan, just
before the ACL conference. This workshop was organized jointly with
SIG/SLUD, the Japanese national interest group on spoken language
understanding and dialogue. The general chair was Akira Kurematsu, and
the program chairs were Alex Rudnicky and Syun Tutiya.  The 5th
workshop was just held at MIT, just before the HLT/NAACL conference in
May 2004, with workshop chairs Candace Sidner and Michael
Strube. Plans are currently underway for the 6th workshop, to be held
in Lisbon, Portugal, in September 2005, just before the Eurospeech
conference. Program chairs will be Wolfgang Minker and Laila
Dybkjaer. More information on Sigdial workshops can be found here:
http://www.sigdial.org/workshops/

Sigdial also endorses other workshops in the general area of discourse
and dialogue. The following endorsed workshops were held during the
past year:

July 20-21 2003: AI in Education 2003 Workshop on "Tutorial Dialogue
Systems: With a View Towards the Classroom" (Sydney, Australia)

August 28-31 2003: ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop on Error
Handling in Spoken Dialogue Systems (Chateau-d'Oex-Vaud, Switzerland)

September 4-6 2003: DiaBruck 2003: Seventh Workshop on the Semantics
and Pragmatics of Dialogue (Saarbruecken, Germany)

June 14-16 2004: Affective Dialogue Systems (Kloster Irsee, Germany)

The following upcoming workshops have also been endorsed:

July 19-21: CATALOG '04: 8th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics
of Dialogue (Barcelona, Spain)

Oct 22-24 2004: 2004 AAAI Fall Symposium on Dialogue Systems for
Health Communication. (Washington, DC).

Sigdial has also maintained a collaboration with Elsnet, with a
SIGdial contribution in Elsnews through its final issue.  Sigdial
contributors in the last year include: John Aberdeen, Arne Jonsson,
Michael McTear, Candy Sidner, and Ronnie Smith. The contributions can
be found in the issues at http://www.elsnet.org/elsnews.html