SIGDIAL 2020

SIGDIAL 2020
21st Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue
Event in series	SIGDIAL
Dates	2020/07/01 (iCal) - 2020/07/03
Homepage:	https://www.sigdial.org/files/workshops/conference21/
Submitting link:	https://www.softconf.com/l/sigdial2020/
Location
Location:	Seattle, Washington, Online
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Important dates
Notification:	2020/04/28
Camera ready due:	2020/05/18
Committees
Organizers:	Casey Kennington
General chairs:	Olivier Pietquin
PC chairs:	Smaranda Muresan, Vivian Chen
Keynote speaker:	Asli Celikyilmaz, Diane Litman, Gabriel Skantze
Table of Contents

The 21st Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL 2020) will be held virtually from July 1-3, 2020. SIGDIAL will be temporally co-located with ACL 2020, which will also be held virtually from July 5-10 (https://acl2020.org/).

SIGDIAL 2020 Virtual July 1-3

The SIGDIAL venue provides a regular forum for the presentation of cutting edge research in discourse and dialogue to both academic and industry researchers. Continuing a series of nineteen successful previous meetings, this conference spans the research interest areas of discourse and dialogue. The conference is sponsored by the SIGdial organization, which serves as the Special Interest Group in discourse and dialogue for both ACL and ISCA.

Dear SIGdial Community (April 24, 2020), We hope you and your families are safe and well. We can now confirm that in response to COVID-19 we will be holding SIGDIAL 2020 as a virtual conference, on the original dates of July 1-3, 2020. We will have pre-recorded talks and demos, and will be planning various live events like Q&A sessions, mentoring and spaces for “hallway” conversations. In addition to presenting virtually this year, the authors of accepted papers will have the opportunity to present their work next year at SIGDIAL 2021 as well in a form that will be decided and communicated later. In addition, because many in our SIGDIAL community have their lives and schedules affected by COVID-19, we have decided to slightly slow down the reviewing process to grant everyone more time to fit SIGDIAL responsibilities into their other responsibilities. Giving this the notification of acceptance will be delayed by two days to April 28, 2020 and camera-ready deadline extended to May 18, 2020. We will shortly update our calendar of important dates. We’ll be posting more details on registration in the next few weeks and more on the mechanics of the virtual conference soon. IMPORTANT CHANGE FROM PREVIOUS CONFERENCES Multiple Submission Policy: SIGDIAL no longer accepts papers that have been submitted to other meetings or journals whose review periods overlap with that of SIGDIAL.

SIGDIAL2020 will have a special session on “Situated Dialogue with Virtual Agents and Robots (RoboDIAL 2020).

TOPICS

We welcome formal, corpus-based, implementation, experimental, or analytical work on discourse and dialogue including, but not restricted to, the following themes:

• Discourse Processing
• Rhetorical and coherence relations, discourse parsing and discourse connectives. Reference resolution. Event representation and causality in narrative. Argument mining. Quality and style in text. Cross-lingual discourse analysis. Discourse issues in applications such as machine translation, text summarization, essay grading, question answering and information retrieval.
• Dialogue Systems
• Open domain, task oriented dialogue and chat systems. Knowledge graphs and dialogue. Dialogue state tracking and policy learning. Social and emotional intelligence. Dialogue issues in virtual reality and human-robot interaction. Entrainment, alignment and priming. Generation for dialogue. Style, voice, and personality. Spoken, multi-modal, embedded, situated, and text/web based dialogue systems, their components, evaluation and applications.
• Corpora, Tools and Methodology
• Corpus-based and experimental work on discourse and dialogue, including supporting topics such as annotation tools and schemes, crowdsourcing, evaluation methodology and corpora.
• Pragmatic and/or Semantic Modeling
• Pragmatics or semantics of discourse and dialogue (i.e., beyond a single sentence).
• Applications of Dialogue and Discourse Processing Technology

Committees

General Chair

• Olivier Pietquin, Google AI

Program Chairs

• Smaranda Muresan, Data Science Institute, Columbia University
• Vivian Chen, National Taiwan University

Local/Virtual Chair

• Casey Kennington, Boise State University

Sponsorship Chair

• David Vandyke, University of Cambridge

Mentoring Chair

• Nina Dethlefs, University of Hull

Publication Chair

• Stefan Ultes, Daimler AG, Germany

SIGDIAL President

• Gabriel Skantze, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden

SIGDIAL Vice President

• Mikio Nakano, Honda Research Institute Japan, Japan