Papers: Call & Submission

The Third Workshop on

Reasoning and Learning for Human-Machine Dialogues (DEEP-DIAL 2020)

at AAAI 2020


Web Site: https://sites.google.com/view/deep-dial2020

Submission Site: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=deepdial20 (Due: November 18, 2019)

Natural conversation is a hallmark of intelligent systems. Unsurprisingly, dialog systems have been a key sub-area of AI for decades. Their most recent form, chatbots, which can engage people in natural conversation and are easy to build in software, have been in the news a lot lately. There are many platforms to create dialogs quickly for any domain based on simple rules. Further, there is a mad rush by companies to release chatbots to show their AI capabilities and gain market valuation. However, beyond basic demonstration, there is little experience in how they can be designed and used for real-world applications needing decision making under practical constraints of resources and time (e.g., sequential decision making) and being fair to people chatbots interact with.

The workshop is the third edition of the Workshop on Reasoning and Learning for Human-Machine Dialogues. The first edition DEEP-DIAL 2018 ( http://www.zensar.com/deep-dial18) was held at New Orleans, USA in Feb 2018 which attracted over 100 participants. The second edition, DEEP-DIAL19 (https://sites.google.com/view/deep-dial-2019/), at AAAI 2019 was again a huge success attracting 100+ AI researchers to discuss a variety of topics.

There is ever increasing interest and need for innovation in Human-Technology-Interaction as addressed in the context of Companion Technology. Here, the aim is to implement technical systems that smartly adapt their functionality to their users’ individual needs and requirements and are even able to solve problems in close co-operation with human users. To this end, they need to enter into a dialog and should be able to convincingly explain their suggestions and their decision making behavior.

From research side, statistical and machine learning methods are well entrenched for language understanding and entity detection. However, the wider problem of dialog management is unaddressed with mainstream tools supporting rudimentary rule-based processing. There is an urgent need to highlight the crucial role of reasoning methods, like constraints satisfaction, planning and scheduling, and learning working together with them, can play to build an end-to-end conversation system that evolves over time. From practical side, conversation systems need to be designed for working with people in a manner that they can explain their reasoning, convince humans about choices among alternatives, and can stand up to ethical standards demanded in real life settings.

With these motivations, some areas of interest for the workshop, but not limited to, are:

  • Dialog Systems
      • Design considerations for dialog systems
      • Evaluation of dialog systems, metrics
      • Open domain dialog and chat systems
      • Task-oriented dialogs
      • Style, voice and personality in spoken dialogue and written text
      • Novel Methods for NL Generation for dialogs
      • Early experiences with implemented dialog systems
      • Mixed-initiative dialogs where a partner is a combination of agent and human
      • Hybrid methods
  • Reasoning
      • Domain model acquisition, especially from unstructured text
      • Plan recognition in natural conversation
      • Planning and reasoning in the context of dialog systems
      • Handling uncertainity
      • Optimal dialog strategies
  • Learning
      • Learning to reason
      • Learning for dialog management
      • End2end models for conversation
      • Explaining dialog policy
  • Practical Considerations
      • o Responsible chatting
      • o Ethical issues with learning and reasoning in dialog systems
      • o Corpora, Tools and Methodology for Dialogue Systems
      • o Securing one’s chat


Paper preparation instructions

Submissions must be formatted in AAAI two-column, camera-ready style (see https://www.aaai.org/Publications/Templates/AuthorKit20.zip). Regular research papers may be no longer than 7 pages, where page 7 must contain only references, and no other text whatsoever. Short papers, which describe a position on the topic of the workshop or a demonstration/tool, may be no longer than 4 pages, references included.

Electronic submissions to be uploaded at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=deepdial20

Important Dates

  • Nov 18, 2019 Workshop paper submissions due
  • Dec 5, 2019 Notification to authors
  • Dec 12, 2019 Camera-ready copies of authors’ papers
  • Dec 13, 2019 AAAI early registration deadline
  • Feb 7/8, 2020 Workshop date