Appel: SIGDIAL 2014 Conference, June 18th-20th, Philadelphia, USA

Sat Feb 8 11:01:30 UTC 2014

Date: Thu, 6 Feb 2014 09:47:00 +0000
From: Helen Hastie <h.hastie at hw.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <CAPv1Dq7wyWKgP3NVHet90AX1vKHHpPjTaqfAf3-DLo3pu=PWhg at mail.gmail.com>
X-url: http://www.sigdial.org/workshops/conference15

*SIGDIAL 2014 CONFERENCE*
*Wednesday, June 18 to Friday, June 20, 2014   *

The 15th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and
Dialog will be co-located with the 8th International Conference on
Natural Language Generation (INLG 2014 (http://inlg2014.wordpress.com/))
in Philadelphia, PA, USA and immediately preceding ACL 2014.

     http://www.sigdial.org/workshops/conference15

*CALL FOR PAPERS*The 2014 SIGDIAL conference continues a series of
fourteen conferences, providing a regular forum for the presentation of
cutting edge research across the areas of discourse and dialog and
attracting a diverse set of participants from academia and industry. The
conference is sponsored by the SIGdial organization, which serves as the
Special Interest Group on discourse and dialog for both ACL and ISCA.

*KEYNOTE SPEAKERS*We are pleased to announce our keynote speakers will
be Prof. Steve Young from the University of Cambridge and Prof. Lillian
Lee from Cornell University.

*TOPICS OF INTEREST*We welcome formal, corpus-based, system-building or
analytical work on discourse and dialog including but not restricted to
the following themes and topics:

- Discourse Processing and Dialog Systems

- Corpora, Tools and Methodology

- Pragmatic and/or Semantic Modeling

- Dimensions of Interaction

- Open Domain Dialog

- Style, Voice and Personality in Spoken Dialog and Written Text

- Applications of Dialog and Discourse Processing Technology

- Novel Methods for Generation Within Dialog for a joint special session
  with INLG

*SPECIAL SESSIONS*There will be one special session co-located with
INLG<http://inlg2014.wordpress.com/>on the morning of June 20th. There
will be a second special session on the Dialogue State Tracking
Challenge (DSTC) (http://camdial.org/~mh521/dstc/)*. *Proposals for
additional special sessions are also still welcome. Special sessions
submission will undergo regular SIGdial review process.

*IMPORTANT DATES*

*Special Session Proposal Deadline:   *       Sunday, 9 February 2014
(23:59, GMT-11)

*Special Session Notification:   *            Monday, 17 February 2014

*Long, Short and Demonstration*

*Paper Submission Deadline:   *               Sunday, 9 March 2014 (23:59, GMT-11)

*Paper Notification:  *                       Friday, 18 April 2014

*Final Paper Due*

- For papers accepted subject to receiving mentoring     Wednesday, 14 May  2014

- For accepted papers                         Friday, 23 May 2014

*Conference *        Wednesday, June 18, 2014 to Friday, June 20, 2014

*SUBMISSIONS*

*Special Session Proposals*

The SIGdial organizers welcome the submission of special session
proposals.  A SIGDIAL special session is the length of a regular session
at the conference; may be organized as a poster session, a poster
session with panel discussion, or an oral presentation session; and will
be held on the last day of the conference.  Special sessions may, at the
discretion of the SIGdial organizers, be held as parallel sessions.
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; and a requested format (poster/panel/oral session).  These
proposals should be sent to *conference[a]sigdial.org
(http://sigdial.org)* by the special session proposal deadline.  Special
session proposals will be reviewed jointly by the general and program
co-chairs.

*Papers*

The program committee welcomes the submission of long papers, short
papers, and demonstration descriptions. All accepted submissions will be
published in the conference proceedings.

Long papers may, at the discretion of the technical program committee,
be accepted for oral or poster presentation. They must be no longer than
8 pages, including title, content, and examples. Two additional pages
are allowed for references and appendices, which may include extended
example discourses or dialogs, algorithms, graphical representations,
etc.

Short papers will be presented as posters. They should be no longer than
4 pages, including title and content. One additional page is allowed for
references and appendices.

Demonstration papers should be no longer than 3 pages, including
references. A separate one-page document should be provided to the
program co-chairs for demonstration descriptions, specifying furniture
and equipment needed for the demo.

Authors of a submission may designate their paper to be considered for a
SIGDIAL special session, which would highlight a particular area or
topic.  All papers will undergo regular peer review.

Papers that have been or will be submitted to other meetings or
publications must provide this information (see submission format). A
paper accepted for presentation at SIGDIAL 2014 must not have been
presented at any other meeting with publicly available proceedings. Any
questions regarding submissions can be sent to the program co-chairs at
program-chairs[at]sigdial.org.

Authors are encouraged to submit additional supportive material such as
video clips or sound clips and examples of available resources for
review purposes.

Submission is electronic using paper submission software.

*FORMAT*

All long, short, and demonstration submissions should follow the
two-column ACL 2014 format. We strongly recommend the use of ACL LaTeX
style files or Microsoft Word style files tailored for the ACL 2014
conference.  Submissions must conform to the official ACL 2014 style
guidelines ( http://www.cs.jhu.edu/ACL2014/CallforPapers.htm), and they
must be electronic in PDF. As in most previous years, submissions will
not be anonymous.

*MENTORING SERVICE*

For several years, the SIGDIAL conference has offered a mentoring
service.  Submissions with innovative core ideas that may need language
(English) or organizational assistance will be flagged for "mentoring"
and conditionally 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.  Any questions about the mentoring
service can be addressed to the mentoring chair at
mentoring[at]sigdial.org.

*STUDENT SUPPORT*

SIGdial also offers a limited number of scholarships for students
presenting a paper accepted to the conference. Application materials
will be posted at the conference website.

*BEST PAPER AWARDS*

In order to recognize significant advancements in dialog and discourse
science and technology, SIGDIAL will recognize two best paper awards. A
selection committee consisting of prominent researchers in the fields of
interest will select the recipients of the awards.

*SPONSORSHIP*

SIGDIAL offers a number of opportunities for sponsors. For more
information, email the conference organizers at
sponsor-chair[at]sigdial.org .

*DIALOG AND DISCOURSE*

SIGDIAL authors are encouraged to submit their research to the journal
Dialog and Discourse, which is endorsed by SIGdial.

*ORGANIZING COMMITTEE*

General Co-Chairs

Kallirroi Georgila, University of Southern California, USA
Matthew Stone, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, USA

Technical Program Co-Chairs

Helen Hastie, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, UK
Ani Nenkova, University of Pennsylvania, USA

Mentoring Chair

Svetlana Stoyanchev, AT&T Research Labs, USA

Local Chair

Keelan Evanini, Educational Testing Service, USA

Sponsorships Chair

Giuseppe Di Fabbrizio, Amazon.com, USA

SIGdial President

Amanda Stent, Yahoo! Labs, USA

SIGdial Vice President

Jason Williams, Microsoft Research, USA

SIGdial Secretary/Treasurer

Kristiina Jokinen, University of Helsinki, Finland