WOCHAT: Second Workshop on Chatbots and Conversational Agent Technologies
http://workshop.colips.org/wochat/
Collocated with IVA 2016 in Los Angeles, California
http://iva2016.ict.usc.edu/
Workshop Description
Although non goal-oriented dialogue systems have been around for many years
(almost fifty years indeed, if we consider Weizenbaum’s Eliza system as the
starting milestone), they have been recently gaining a lot of popularity in both
research and commercial arenas. From the commercial stand point, non
goal-oriented dialogue seems to be providing an excellent means to engage users
for entertainment purposes, as well as to give a more human-like appearance to
established vertical goal-oriented dialogue systems.
From the research perspective, on the other hand, this kind of systems poses
interesting challenges and problems to the research community. The main
objective of the workshop is to bring together researchers working on problems
related to chat-oriented dialogue for promoting discussion and knowledge sharing
about the state-of-the-art and novel techniques in this field, as well as to
coordinate a collaborative effort to collect/generate data, resources and
evaluation protocols for future research in this area.
Topics of Interest
This workshop invites original research contributions on all aspects of non
goal-oriented dialogue, including closely related areas such as knowledge
representation and reasoning, language generation, and natural language
understanding, among others. In this sense the workshop will invite for both
long and short paper submissions in areas including (but not restricted to):
* Chat-oriented dialogue systems
* Data collections and resources
* Information extraction
* Natural language understanding
* General domain knowledge representation
* Common sense and reasoning
* Natural language generation
* Emotion detection and generation
* Sense of humour detection and generation
* Chat-oriented dialogue evaluation
* User studies and system evaluation
* Multimodal human-computer interaction
Shared Task on Collecting Resources for Chat-oriented Dialogue
As part of WOCHAT program activities, a shared task on data collection and
annotation will be conducted. In this task, participants will generate
human-machine and human-human dialogues and annotate them. Human-machine
dialogues will be generated by using different online and offline chat engines,
and annotations are to be generated following a provided set of guidelines. The
collected dataset will be made publicly available to the research community for
further research and experimentation in future editions of the workshop.
For more information about the shared task and how to participate in it please
visit: http://workshop.colips.org/wochat/shared.html
Paper Format and Submissions
Paper submissions to WOCHAT should follow the IVA 2016 paper submission
policy. Submissions should be anonymous and in Springer LNCS format. Prospective
authors are invited to submit full papers (up to 12 pages) or short papers (up
to 8 pages). Paper submission link: https://wochat.confmaster.net
Important Dates
June 28, 2016: Paper Submission Deadline
July 19, 2016: Paper Acceptance Notification
August 2, 2016: Camera Ready Version Deadline
September 20, 2016: Workshop is held at IVA 2016
Program Committee Members
* Björn Schuller, Imperial College London, UK
* David Suendermann, Educational Testing Service (ETS), USA
* Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Microsoft Research, USA
* Gabriel Skantze, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
* Haizhou Li, Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore
* Jason Williams, Microsoft Research, USA
* Jiang Ridong, Agency for Science, Technology and Research, Singapore
* Justine Cassell, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
* Kristiina Jokinen, University of Helsinki, Finland
* Kotaro Funakoshi, Honda Research Institute, Japan
* Laurence Devillers, LIMSI-CNRS, France
* Luis D'Haro, Agency for Science, Technology and Research, Singapore
* Luisa Coheur, Lisbon University, Portugal
* Matthew Henderson, Google Research, USA
* Michael McTear, University of Ulster, UK
* Mikio Nakano, Honda Research Institute, Japan
* Nick Campbell, Trinity College Dublin, Irland
* Oliver Lemon, Heriot-Watt University, UK
* Ramón López-Cózar, University of Granada, Spain
* Sakriani Sakti, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan
* Satoshi Nakamura, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan
* Seokhwan Kim, Agency for Science, Technology and Research, Singapore
* Sophie Rosset, LIMSI-CNRS, France
* Stefan Ultes, Cambridge University, UK
* Suraj Nair, Technische Universität München, Germany
* Teruhisa Misu, Honda Research Institute, USA
* Tomoki Toda, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan
* Yasuharo Den, Chiba University, Japan
* Shiv Vitaladevuni, Amazon, USA
Shared Task Co-organizers
* Bayan Abu Shawar, Arab Open University, Jordan
* Luis Fernando D'Haro, Agency for Science, Technology and Research, Singapore
* Zhou Yu, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Workshop Organizers
* Rafael E. Banchs, Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore
* Ryuichiro Higashinaka, NTT Media Intelligence Laboratories, Nippon telegraph and telephone corporation, Japan
* Wolfgang Minker, Institute of Communications Engineering, Ulm University, Germany
* Joseph Mariani, LIMSI-CNRS, France
* David Traum, University of Southern California, Institute for Creative Technologies, USA