SIGDIAL 2018

SIGDIAL 2018
19th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue
Event in series	SIGDIAL
Dates	2018/07/12 (iCal) - 2018/07/14
Homepage:	https://www.sigdial.org/files/workshops/conference19/
Location
Location:	Melbourne, Australia
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Table of Contents

SIGDIAL 2018 Melbourne, Australia July 12-14, 2018

In cooperation with:

• Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
• International Speech Communication Association (ISCA)
• Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)

We are excited to welcome you to this year’s SIGdial Conference, the 19th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue. We are pleased to hold the conference in Melbourne, Australia, on July 12-14th, in close proximity to both ACL 2018 (the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics) and YRRSDS 2018 (the 14th Young Researchers’ Roundtable on Spoken Dialogue Systems). The SIGdial conference remains a premier publication venue for research in discourse and dialogue. This year, the program includes 3 keynote talks, 5 oral presentation sessions, 3 poster sessions including 1 demo session, and a special session entitled “Physically Situated Dialogue.” We received 111 submissions this year, almost identical to the 113 received in 2017 (which was the 2nd largest number of submissions to SIGdial in its history). Of the 111 submissions, there were 67 long papers, 39 short papers, and 5 demo papers. All submissions received at least 3 reviews. We carefully considered both the numeric ratings and the tenor of the comments, both as written in the reviews and as submitted in discussions, in making our selections for the program. Overall, the members of the Program Committee did an excellent job in reviewing the submitted papers. We thank them for their important role in selecting the accepted papers and for helping to come up with a high quality program for the conference. In line with the SIGdial tradition, our aim has been to create a balanced program that accommodates as many favorably rated papers as possible. We accepted 52 papers: 36 long papers, 12 short papers, and 4 demo papers. These numbers give an overall acceptance rate of 47%. The rates separately for types of papers are 54% for long papers, 31% for short papers, and 80% for demo papers. After acceptance, 3 papers (2 long and 1 demo) that had also been submitted to other conferences were withdrawn. Of the long papers, 19 were presented as oral presentations. The remaining long papers and all the short papers were presented as posters, split across three poster sessions. This year SIGdial has a special session on the topic “Physically Situated Dialogue”, organized by Sean Andrist, Stephanie Lukin, Matthew Marge, Jesse Thomason, and Zhou Yu. The special session brings diverse paper submissions on a topic of growing interest to our technical program, with 7 of the accepted long papers part of this special session. The special session also features a panel discussion and latebreaking presentations, allowing for active engagement of the conference participants. This year’s SIGdial conference runs 3 full days, following the precedent set in 2017. One keynote and one poster session is held each day, with the remaining time given to oral presentations, demos, and the special session. A conference of this scale requires advice, help and enthusiastic participation of many parties and we have a big ‘thank you’ to say to all of them. Regarding the program, we thank our three keynote speakers, Mari Ostendorf (University ofWashington, USA), Ingrid Zukerman (Monash University, Australia), and Milica Gasic (University of Cambridge) for their inspiring talks on socialbots, interpretation in physical settings, and machine learning techniques, which cover many modern aspects of research in both discourse and dialogue. We also thank the organizers of the special session who designed the schedule for their accepted papers, and organized the session with a panel and late-breaking presentations at the venue. We are grateful for their smooth and efficient coordination with the main conference. We in addition thank Alex Papangelis, Mentoring Chair for SIGdial 2018, for his dedicated work on the mentoring process. The goal of mentoring is to assist authors of papers that contain important ideas but lack clarity. In total, 6 of the accepted papers received mentoring and we would like to thank our mentoring team for their excellent advice and support to the respective authors. iv