ISCA Special Interest Group: Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDial)

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Aims. SIGdial is the ISCA SIG on Discourse and Dialogue. It is also a Special Interest Group of the Association for Computational Linguistics. It is affiliated with the Association for the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence and sponsored by Elsnet. SIGdial aims to encourage researchers and educators to:

  • promote development and distribution of reusable discourse processing components;
  • explore techniques for evaluation of dialogue systems;
  • share resources and data among the international community;
  • encourage empirical methods in research;
  • agree upon standards for discourse transcription, segmentation, and annotation;
  • promote collaboration among developers of various dialogue system components;
  • support student participation in the discourse and dialogue community.

Motivation. SIGdial performs and encourages the following functions and activities:

  • promotion and development of the field and avenues for publication;
  • provision and coordination of a library of discourse processing development tools, software, data, bibliographic references, publications, and links to related web pages;
  • facilitation of communication between researchers in this field;
  • provision of information about relevant research and resources; and,
  • development of standard corpora and interface formats for coordination of the organization of workshops and symposia liaison with other SIGs, funding organizations, etc.

Board. Elections have been organised for the SIG officers on 2013:

  • President: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. (AT&T Labs Research, USA)
  • Vice-President: Jason Williams (Microsoft Research, USA)
  • Secretary/treasurer: Kristiina Jokinen (University of Helsinki, Finland)
  • ISCA liaison officer: Amanda Stent  (Yahoo Labs, USA)

ISCA-supported events

SIGDIAL is the principal meeting of the discourse and dialog community:

Since 2009, SIGdial also endorses the International Workshop on Spoken Dialogue Systems (IWSDS). IWSDS is a more focused workshop, centered on a specific theme within the field and possibly overlapping with other fields:

  • IWSDS 2018, (topic Towards creating more human-like conversational agent technologies), 14/5-16/5, Singapore
  • IWSDS 2017, (topic The Future of Social Interaction with Agents), 6/6-9/6, Pittsburgh, PE, USA
  • IWSDS 2016, (topic Social Robots: Enablements, Analyses, and Evaluation), 13/1-16/1, Saariselkä, Finland
  • IWSDS 2015, (topic Dialog System and Intelligent Assistant), 11/1-13/1, Busan, South Korea
  • IWSDS 2014, (topic Situated Dialog), 9/12-11/12, Napa, CA, USA
  • IWSDS 2012, (topic Towards a Natural Interaction with Robots, Knowbots and Smartphones), 28/11-30/11, Paris, France
  • IWSDS 2011, (topic Paralinguistic Information and its Integration in Spoken Dialogue Systems), 1/9-3/11, Granada, Spain
  • IWSDS 2010, (topic Spoken Dialogue Systems for Ambient Environment) 1/10-2/10, Gotemba Kogen, Japan
  • IWSDS 2009, 9/12-11/12, Kloster Irsee, Germany

SIGdial also endorses the SemDial Workshops. They aim at bringing together researchers working on the semantics and pragmatics of dialogue in fields such as formal semantics and pragmatics, artificial intelligence, computational linguistics, psychology, and neural science:

SIGdial also endorses the Young Researchers’ Roundtable on Spoken Dialog Systems

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