Bridging the Gap: Academic and Industrial Research in Dialog Technology

April 26, 2007
Rochester, NY

Workshop Schedule

Accepted papers

 

Call for Papers

In the recent years, we have seen rapid adoption of dialog systems in commercial applications. They range from telephone-based services, in-car interactive systems, to online conversational service agents and talking characters in computer games. Open-standard platforms such as VoiceXML have been adopted by the industry, and become the driving force for the faster adoption of dialog applications. 

The widespread dialog applications in industry setting pose challenges for researchers in both industrial and academic worlds. Progress from academic world has not benefited the real world applications to a satisfactory extent. This is partly due to different research interests and priorities from the two camps: one is heavily driven by imminent daily needs from the end customers; the other is largely driven by academic curiosity towards understanding the nature of human-human and human-machine dialogs. The two research agenda lead to somewhat different performance and evaluation metrics.

The purpose of this one day workshop is to provide a forum to bring industrial and academic researchers together to share their experiences and visions in the dialog technology development, and to identify topics that are of interest to both camps.

Topics

We invite submissions of papers covering the full range of dialog systems. Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

  • Robustness and error handling in dialog systems
  • Adaptive dialog systems
  • Scalability of dialog systems
  • Domain portability issues
  • Methodology and tools for use case and dialog flow design
  • Performance evaluation methods and metrics
  • Comparison of statistical and non-statistical approaches in terms of effort and performance
  • Challenging issues for the future research
  • The application and limitations of open standards such as VoiceXML and SALT
  • In depth discussion of dialog systems successfully deployed in industrial applications, which include but are not limited to:

·         Call centers

    • Internet service
    • Automotive
    • Mobile devices
    • Computer games
    • Desktop applications
  • Other topics

Submissions

We invite academic and industrial researchers and practitioners to submit original research papers, well-written surveys, or papers describing deployed systems to the workshop. The papers must not exceed 8 pages in length including references and should be prepared using the HLT-NAACL format. The reviewing process will be blind, so authors' names, affiliations, and all self-references should not be included in the paper. Submissions should be sent through the HLT submission page (http://www.softconf.com/hlt/wsdialog/).

Important Dates:

Submission Deadline: January 15, 2007
Acceptance Notification: February 17, 2007
Camera-ready Copy: February 24, 2007
Workshop Date: April 26, 2007

Organizing Committee

Fuliang Weng, Bosch Research
Ye-Yi Wang, Microsoft Corporation
Gokhan Tur, SRI International
Junling Hu, Bosch Research

Program Committee

James Allen, University of Rochester
Mark Fanty, Nuance Communications
Sadaoki Furui, Tokyo Institute of Technology
Dilek Hakkani-Tur, ICSI, UC Berkeley
Juan Huerta, T.J. Watson Research Center, IBM
Michael Johnston, AT&T Labs
Yun-Cheng Ju, Microsoft Research, Microsoft
Dekang Lin, Google Labs, Google
Helen Meng, CUHK
Tim Paek, Microsoft Research, Microsoft
Stanley Peters, Stanford University
Roberto Pieracini, SpeechCycle
Alex Rudnicky, CMU
Stephanie Seneff, MIT
Lenhart Schubert, University of Rochester
Steve Young, Cambridge University

Question and Comments: Please contact fuliang.weng@us.bosch.com