NAACL HLT 2012 Workshop on Future directions and needs in the Spoken Dialog Community: Tools and Data

Description of the Workshop

The goal of this workshop is to determine what the present and future common needs of the spoken dialog research community are.

The spoken dialog research community has interests in a wide variety of topics such as belief tracking, multimodal dialog, simulated users, dialog assessment, etc. This diversity of interests makes it difficult to find common threads that can bind the community together. We can cite three types of existing common tools and data. One is data sharing. Another is the Spoken Dialog Challenge, which enables many researchers to compare techniques on a common task. Yet another is the use of a well-documented platform that can be used to teach new researchers about spoken dialog architecture, thus enabling easier entry to our field, a project which has also begun. There may be other needs that have emerged in the community. This workshop will describe the present state of tools and data, and explore upcoming needs.

This workshop will be sponsored by the Dialog Research Center (DialRC), a project funded by the NSF Community Research Initiative (CRI) Program, which has served the community by providing data, a teaching tool platform and a common challenge task.

The workshop encourages papers on the state of the art in spoken dialog and needs in data and tools. The areas suggested are:

dialog system architecture (new architectures, modules, etc.)
speech recognition for spoken dialog systems (noise robust telephone ASR, etc)
dialog management (plan-based, information state update, turn-taking, error handling, grounding, etc)
statistical machine learning (reinforcement learning, user simulation, belief tracking, etc)
speech synthesis (conversational articulatory synthesis, natural language generation, etc)
tutoring systems (ESL task-oriented systems, etc)
human-robot dialog, dialog systems in 3D virtual worlds
dialog system assessment
and other related areas
In the morning, speakers will cover the main advances that have been made in that area in the past five years and then point to specific promising topics of research. Noted spoken dialog researchers will then organize breakout groups on these topics and the groups will report back to all of the participants to attempt to define needs that are common across topics and thus the most widespread in the community.

Important Dates

Initial Submission April 6th, 2012
Notification: April 24th, 2012
Final submission: May 7, 2012
Workshop June 7, 2012

rkshop will be sponsored by the Dialog Research Center (DialRC), a project funded by the NSF Community Research Initiative (CRI) Program, which has served the community by providing data, a teaching tool platform and a common challenge task.

The workshop encourages papers on the state of the art in spoken dialog and needs in data and tools. The areas suggested are:

dialog system architecture (new architectures, modules, etc.)
speech recognition for spoken dialog systems (noise robust telephone ASR, etc)
dialog management (plan-based, information state update, turn-taking, error handling, grounding, etc)
statistical machine learning (reinforcement learning, user simulation, belief tracking, etc)
speech synthesis (conversational articulatory synthesis, natural language generation, etc)
tutoring systems (ESL task-oriented systems, etc)
human-robot dialog, dialog systems in 3D virtual worlds
dialog system assessment
and other related areas
In the morning, speakers will cover the main advances that have been made in that area in the past five years and then point to specific promising topics of research. Noted spoken dialog researchers will then organize breakout groups on these topics and the groups will report back to all of the participants to attempt to define needs that are common across topics and thus the most widespread in the community.

Important Dates

Initial Submission April 6th, 2012
Notification: April 24th, 2012
Final submission: May 7, 2012
Workshop June 7, 2012
Submissions

Potential participants should submit one of the following:
short project note on existing tools (no more than 4 pages, for possible presentation during the poster session)
position statements on either future directions and needs and/or ideas for future tools or efforts to address these needs (no more than two pages, to be posted in advance, possibly summarized in the morning talks, and discussed in the breakout groups)
All submissions should be in NAACL format (but submissions need not be anonymous).

Submit papers to https://www.softconf.com/naaclhlt2012/SDCTD2012/

Organizing Committee

Maxine Eskenazi Carnegie Mellon
Alan Black Carnegie Mellon
David Traum USC Institute for Creative Technologies
Scientific Committee

Dan Bohus Microsoft
Joyce Chai Michigan State University
Dilek Hakkani-Tur Microsoft
Helen Hastie Heriot-Watt University
Julia Hirschberg Columbia
Kristiina Jokinen University of Helsinki
Diane Litman University of Pittsburgh
Helen Meng Chinese University of Hong Kong
Wolfgang Minker University of Ulm
Sebastien Moeller Deutsche Telecom
Olivier Pietequin Supelec
Antoine Raux Honda
Guiseppe Riccardi University of Trento
Amanda Stent AT&T
David Suendermann SpeechCycle
Nigel Ward University of Texas El Paso
Jason Williams AT&T
Steve Young Cambridge University