Calls

Call for Special Sessions

The Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL) organizers welcome the submission of special session proposals. We welcome special session proposals on any topic of interest to the discourse and dialogue communities. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to Role of Discourse in NLP Applications, Explainable AI, Evaluation, Annotation, and End‐to‐end systems.

A SIGDIAL special session is the length of a regular session at the conference, and may be organized as a poster session, a panel session, a poster session with panel discussion, or an oral presentation session. Special sessions may, at the discretion of the SIGDIAL organizers, be held as parallel sessions. The papers submitted to special sessions are handled by the special session organizers, but for the submitted papers to be in the SIGDIAL proceedings, they have to undergo the same review process as regular papers. The reviewers for the special session papers will be taken from the SIGDIAL program committee itself, taking into account the suggestions of the session organizers, and the program chairs will make acceptance decisions. In other words, special session organizers decide what appears in the session, while the program chairs decide what appears in the proceedings and the rest of the conference program.

Submissions:

Those wishing to organize a special session should prepare a two-page proposal containing: a summary of the topic of the special session; a list of organizers and sponsors; a list of people who may submit and participate in the session; and a requested format (poster/panel/oral session).

These proposals should be sent to conference@sigdial.org by the special session proposal deadline. Special session proposals will be reviewed jointly by the general chair and program co‐chairs.

Links:

Those wishing to propose a special session may want to look at some of the sessions organized at recent SIGDIAL meetings.
http://www.cs.utep.edu/nigel/deep/
https://robodial.github.io/
https://www.sigdial.org/files/workshops/conference18/sessions.htm
http://articulab.hcii.cs.cmu.edu/sigdial2016/

Call for Papers

The 21st Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL 2020) will be held on July 1-3, 2020 at the Jack’s Urban Meeting Place (JUMP) in Boise, Idaho, USA. SIGDIAL will be temporally co-located with ACL 2020, which will be held on July 5-10 in Seattle, Washington, USA (https://acl2020.org/).

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.

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). Please see https://robodial.github.io/ for details (including different types of paper submissions and deadlines).

TOPICS OF INTEREST

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

SUBMISSIONS

The program committee welcomes the submission of long papers, short papers and demo descriptions. Papers submitted as long papers may be accepted as long papers for oral presentation or long papers for poster presentation. Accepted short papers will be presented as posters.

• Long paper submissions must describe substantial, original, completed and unpublished work. Wherever appropriate, concrete evaluation and analysis should be included. Long papers must be no longer than 8 pages, including title, text, figures and tables. An unlimited number of pages is allowed for references. Two additional pages are allowed for appendices containing sample discourses/dialogues and algorithms, and an extra page is allowed in the final version to address reviewers’ comments.
• Short paper submissions must describe original and unpublished work. Please note that a short paper is not a shortened long paper. Instead short papers should have a point that can be made in a few pages, such as a small, focused contribution; a negative results; or an interesting application nugget. Short papers should be no longer than 4 pages including title, text, figures and tables. An unlimited number of pages is allowed for references. One additional page is allowed for sample discourses/dialogues and algorithms, and an extra page is allowed in the final version to address reviewers’ comments.
• Demo descriptions should be no longer than four pages including title, text, examples, figures, tables and references. A separate one-page document should be provided to the program co-chairs for demo descriptions, specifying furniture and equipment needed for the demo.

Authors are encouraged to also submit additional accompanying materials, such as corpora (or corpus examples), demo code, videos and sound files.

Multiple Submissions

SIGDIAL 2020 cannot accept work for publication or presentation that will be (or has been) published elsewhere and that have been or will be submitted to other meetings or publications whose review periods overlap with that of SIGDIAL. Any questions regarding submissions can be sent to program-chairs[at]sigdial.org. These restrictions apply only to refereed journals and meetings, not to unrefereed forums or workshops with a limited audience and without archival proceedings.

Blind Review

Building on previous year's move to anonymous long and short paper submissions, SIGDIAL 2020 will follow the ACL policies for preserving the integrity of double blind review (see author guidelines). Unlike long and short papers, demo descriptions will not be anonymous. Demo descriptions should include the authors' names and affiliations, and self-references are allowed.

Submission Format

All long, short, and demonstration submissions must follow the two-column ACL format. Authors are expected to use the LaTeX or Microsoft Word style template from the ACL conference http://acl2020.org/downloads/acl2020-templates.zip. Submissions must conform to the official ACL style guidelines, which are contained in these templates. Submissions must be electronic, in PDF format.

Submission Link and Deadline

Authors have to fill in the submission form in the START system and upload an initial pdf of their papers before the March 6, 2020 deadline (23:59 GMT-11). However, you have until March 11, 2020 (23:59 GMT-11) to upload a final version of the papers. Note that title, authors and abstract cannot change after the initial deadline of March 6.
https://www.softconf.com/l/sigdial2020/

For special session long and short papers please select “Special Session Long (RoboDial 2.0)” or “Special Session Short (RoboDial 2.0)”.

ADOPTION OF ACL AUTHOR GUIDELINES

As noted above, SIGDIAL 2020 is adopting the ACL guidelines for submission and citation for long and short papers. Long and short papers that do not conform to the following guidelines will be rejected without review.

Preserving Double Blind Review

The following rules and guidelines are meant to protect the integrity of double-blind review and ensure that submissions are reviewed fairly. The rules make reference to the anonymity period, which runs from 1 month before the submission deadline up to the date when your paper is either accepted, rejected, or withdrawn.

• You may not make a non-anonymized version of your paper available online to the general community (for example, via a preprint server) during the anonymity period. By a version of a paper we understand another paper having essentially the same scientific content but possibly differing in minor details (including title and structure) and/or in length (e.g., an abstract is a version of the paper that it summarizes).
• If you have posted a non-anonymized version of your paper online before the start of the anonymity period, you may submit an anonymized version to the conference. The submitted version must not refer to the non-anonymized version, and you must inform the program chair(s) that a non-anonymized version exists. You may not update the non-anonymized version during the anonymity period, and we ask you not to advertise it on social media or take other actions that would further compromise double-blind reviewing during the anonymity period.
• Note that, while you are not prohibited from making a non-anonymous version available online before the start of the anonymity period, this does make double-blind reviewing more difficult to maintain, and we therefore encourage you to wait until the end of the anonymity period if possible.

Citation and Comparison

If you are aware of previous research that appears sound and is relevant to your work, you should cite it even if it has not been peer-reviewed, and certainly if it influenced your own work. However, refereed publications take priority over unpublished work reported in preprints. Specifically:

• You are expected to cite all refereed publications relevant to your submission, but you may be excused for not knowing about all unpublished work (especially work that has been recently posted and/or is not widely cited).
• In cases where a preprint has been superseded by a refereed publication, the refereed publication should be cited in addition to or instead of the preprint version.
Papers (whether refereed or not) appearing less than 3 months before the submission deadline are considered contemporaneous to your submission, and you are therefore not obliged to make detailed comparisons that require additional experimentation and/or in-depth analysis.

MENTORING

Submissions with innovative core ideas that may be in need of language (English) or organizational assistance will be flagged for "mentoring" and accepted with recommendation to revise with a mentor. An experienced mentor who has previously published in the SIGDIAL venue will then help the authors of these flagged papers prepare their submissions for publication.

BEST PAPER AWARDS

In order to recognize significant advancements in dialogue/discourse science and technology, SIGDIAL 2020 will include best paper awards. All papers at the conference are eligible for the best paper awards. A selection committee consisting of prominent researchers in the fields of interest will select the recipients of the awards.

Important Dates

See KEY DATES page

Call for Sponsors

We are looking for sponsors, large and small, to support the conference. Here are standard sponsorship levels but any contribution is welcome and we would be happy to create a custom sponsorship packages just for you!

• Platinum - US $2,500
  Acknowledgement, large logo in the proceedings, large logo + link on the conference website
  Promotional material handed out at the registration
  5 minute presentation during the sponsor session
  Acknowledgement for supporting one of the following: banquet, lunches
  
• Gold - US $1,500
  Acknowledgement, medium logo in proceedings, medium logo + link on the conference website
  Promotional material handed out at the registration
  4 minute presentation during the sponsor session
  Acknowledgement for supporting one of the following: coffee break, video recordings
  
• Silver - US $1,000
  Acknowledgement, logo in the proceedings, logo + link on the conference website
  Promotional material handed out at the registration
  3 minute presentation during the sponsor session
  
• Bronze - US $500
  Promotional material handed out at the registration
  Acknowledgement, logo in the proceedings, logo + link on the conference website