CALL FOR PAPERS

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You can also find details on other pages of the conference's topics of interest, submission deadlines and authors' instructions.

The SIGDIAL venue provides a regular forum for the presentation of cutting edge research in discourse and dialogue to both academic and industry researchers. Due to the success of the nine previous SIGDIAL workshops, SIGDIAL is now a conference. The conference is sponsored by the SIGDIAL organization, which serves as the Special Interest Group in discourse and dialogue for both ACL and ISCA. SIGDIAL 2009 will be co-located with Interspeech 2009 as a satellite event.

In addition to presentations and system demonstrations, the program includes talks by two invited speakers:

TOPICS OF INTEREST

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

1. Discourse Processing and Dialogue Systems

Discourse semantic and pragmatic issues in NLP applications such as text summarization, question answering, information retrieval including topics like:

  • Discourse structure, temporal structure, information structure
  • Discourse markers, cues and particles and their use
  • (Co-)Reference and anaphora resolution, metonymy and bridging resolution
  • Subjectivity, opinions and semantic orientation

Spoken, multi-modal, and text/web based dialogue systems including topics such as:

  • Dialogue management models;
  • Speech and gesture, text and graphics integration;
  • Strategies for preventing, detecting or handling miscommunication (repair and correction types, clarification and under-specificity, grounding and feedback strategies);
  • Utilizing prosodic information for understanding and for disambiguation;

2. Corpora, Tools and Methodology

Corpus-based work on discourse and spoken, text-based and multi-modal dialogue including its support, in particular:

  • Annotation tools and coding schemes;
  • Data resources for discourse and dialogue studies;
  • Corpus-based techniques and analysis (including machine learning);
  • Evaluation of systems and components, including methodology, metrics and case studies;

3. Pragmatic and/or Semantic Modeling

The pragmatics and/or semantics of discourse and dialogue (i.e. beyond a single sentence) including the following issues:

  • The semantics/pragmatics of dialogue acts (including those which are less studied in the semantics/pragmatics framework);
  • Models of discourse/dialogue structure and their relation to referential and relational structure;
  • Prosody in discourse and dialogue;
  • Models of presupposition and accommodation; operational models of conversational implicature.

SUBMISSIONS

The program committee welcomes the submission of long papers for full plenary presentation, as well as short papers and demonstrations. Short papers and demo descriptions will be featured in short plenary presentations, followed by posters and demonstrations.

  • Long papers must be no longer than 8 pages, including title, examples, references, etc. In addition to this, two additional pages are allowed as an appendix which may include extended example discourses or dialogues, algorithms, graphical representations, etc.
  • Short papers and demo descriptions should be 4 pages or less (including title, examples, references, etc.).

Please use the official ACL style files: http://ufal.mff.cuni.cz/acl2007/styles/

Papers that have been or will be submitted to other meetings or publications must provide this information (see submission format). SIGDIAL 2009 cannot accept for publication or presentation work that will be (or has been) published elsewhere. Any questions regarding submissions can be sent to the General Co-Chairs.

Authors are encouraged to make illustrative materials available, on the web or otherwise. For example, excerpts of recorded conversations, recordings of human-computer dialogues, interfaces to working systems, etc.

Copyright of the conference proceedings will be held by ACL.

BEST PAPER AWARDS

In order to recognize significant advancements in dialog and discourse science and technology, SIGDIAL will (for the first time) recognize a BEST PAPER AWARD and a BEST STUDENT PAPER AWARD. A selection committee consisting of prominent researchers in the fields of interest will select the recipients of the awards.

SATELLITE EVENT

The Young Researchers' Roundtable on Spoken Dialogue Systems, a SIGDIAL satellite event, is also to be held at QMUL, on September 13-14 (i.e. immediately following the main conference). This is an annual workshop designed for students, post docs, and junior researchers working in research related to spoken dialogue systems in both academia and industry.

IMPORTANT DATES (SUBJECT TO CHANGE)

  • Submission: May 4, 2009
  • Notification of acceptance: June 28, 2009
  • Final submission: July 17, 2009
  • Conference: September 11-12, 2009
  • Young Researchers' Roundtable: September 13-14, 2009

WEBSITES

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

See here.

TECHNICAL PROGRAM COMMITTEE

See here.