Special Sessions & Workshops
Three Special Sessions and one Workshop have been collocated with IWSDS 2020:
Workshop on Chatbots and Conversational Agents and Dialogue Breakdown Detection Challenge (WOCHAT+DBDC)
Organizing Committee: Ryuichiro Higashinaka, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation, Japan, João Sedoc, Johns Hopkins University, USA, Luis F. D'Haro, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain, Rafael E. Banchs, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Website: http://workshop.colips.org/wochat/
The session will focus on original research contributions on all aspects of chat-oriented dialogue, including closely related areas such as knowledge representation and reasoning, language generation, and natural language understanding, among others. The session will invite papers in areas including (but not restricted to): chat-oriented dialogue systems, data collections and resources, information extraction, natural language understanding and generation, general domain knowledge representation, common sense and reasoning, emotion detection and generation, sense of humor detection and generation, user studies and system evaluation.
The Dialogue Breakdown Detection Challenge shared task will focus on developing machine learning approaches to detect dialogue breakdowns on human-chatbot dialogue sessions. In this edition, in addition to the original breakdown detection task, error classification and sentence generation tasks will be included as well as new datasets from chateval (https://chateval.org/) and newly collected human-chatbot dialogues in languages other than English.
Designing humor in human computer interaction with focus on dialogue technology (HUMIC-DIAL 2020)
Organizing Committee: Andreea I. Niculescu, Kheng hui Yeo, and Nancy Chen, Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R, A*STAR) Singapore
Website: http://www.colips.org/workshop/humic-dial2020/humic/
Humour is pervasive in human social relationships and one of the most common ways to induce positive feelings in others. Research studies have shown that innocent humour increases likeability, boosts friendship, alleviates stress, encourages creativity and improves teamwork. Humour embraces various types of expression - both verbal and non-verbal - and can be used to enhance the interaction outcome while being socially and culturally appropriate.
While humour is a well-established branch in artificial intelligence and natural language processing communities, in the human-computer interaction field humour is rather regarded as marginal research topic, despite its positive effects scientifically proven by decades of research. Therefore, in this workshop we aim to explore challenges in designing, developing and evaluating humourful interactions, as well as benefits and downsides of using humour in interactive tasks with artificial entities. We are welcoming original contributions from a wide range of disciplines, such as human-computer interaction, computational linguistics, artificial intelligence, social robotics, psychology, media, arts etc. Topics
Dialogue systems for mental e-health
Organizing Committee: Zoraida Callejas, Universidad de Granada (Spain), Raquel Justo, Universidad del País Vasco (Spain), María Inés Torres, Universidad del País Vasco (Spain), Raymond Bond, Ulster University (Northern Ireland), Anna Esposito, Università degli Studi della Campania Luigi Vanvitelli
Website: http://menhir-project.eu/index.php/iwsds2020-special-session-dialogue-systems-for-mental-e-health/
This special session aims to bring together researchers and practitioners from academia and industry working on the multidisciplinary area of conversational systems for mental e-health. While most dialogue systems are designed for utilitarian purposes, e.g. make a booking in a restaurant, enabling spoken dialogue between human and machines can also have a great potential to enhance users’ wellbeing. In particular, dialogue-based applications can be a feasible and effective tool to foster mental health due to their flexibility and naturalness. These applications are beginning to be used in mental health for reminding, encouraging, tracking, offering support or even providing interventions. For this special session we will welcome papers that address any of the wide range of scientific and technical challenges related to the use of dialogue systems for mental e-health, including aspects related to natural language and speech processing, knowledge management, emotion/sentiment analysis, dialogue management, user modelling, user experience design as well as practical issues such as corpora acquisition and annotation, user involvement and evaluation.
Speech Language and Conversation Technologies for Iberian Languages
Organizing Committee:
David Griol Barres, Universidad de Granada
Jerónimo Arenas García - Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
David Pérez Fernández, Doaa Samy, María José del Olmo Toribio, María Inés Rodríguez Pelarda, Marta Morales García, José Ramón Granger Alemany, Juan de Dios Llorens Gónzalez - Secretaría de Estado para el Avance Digital. Plan de Impulso de las Tecnologías
Website: https://www.plantl.gob.es/tecnologias-lenguaje/comunicacion-formacion/eventos/Paginas/iwsds-ptl.aspx
The general aim of the Spanish Plan for the Advancement of Language Technology is to promote the development of natural language processing, machine translation and conversational systems in Spanish and co-official languages. The main guidelines defined for the Plan include:
increasing the amount, quality and availability of linguistic infrastructure in Spanish and in Spain’s co-official languages;
fostering the language industry by promoting knowledge transfer and internationalization from the research field to that industry;
improving the quality and capacity of public services, integrating natural language processing and machine translation technologies.
supporting creation, standardization and distribution of language resources created by the management activities performed by the public administrations.
In this workshop, we will show recent initiatives and studies developed within the framework of the Plan, and define new opportunities for collaboration among academic institutions, Public Administrations and companies.