Call for Papers:

The International Workshop on Spoken Dialogue Systems Technology (IWSDS) 2023 invites paper submissions. IWSDS 2023 will be held February 21-24, 2023 in Los Angeles, USA at the University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies. IWSDS 2023 will be a primarily in person event with a hybrid component for those who cannot travel to Los Angeles and wish to attend virtually. This year’s conference theme is “Diversity in Dialogue Systems” (DiDS). We especially invite paper submissions on the following topics:

• Diversity in languages spoken

• Diversity in domain/task being performed (e.g., range of tasks, dialogue systems that engage in multiple tasks)

• Diversity in user population

• Diversity in training data (e.g., ethics/bias considerations)

• Diversity in methods/architectures used for dialogue system development (e.g., end-to-end vs. module-based)

• Diversity in dialogue system evaluation methodologies

• User engagement and emotion in dialogue systems

• Proactive, anticipatory, or incremental interaction

• Use of humor and metaphors in dialogue systems

• Multimodal and situated dialogue systems

• Companions and personal assistant dialogue systems

• Educational and healthcare applications

• Big data and large scale dialogue systems

• Digital resources for interactive dialogue management

• Domain transfer and adaptation techniques for dialogue systems

• Dialogue systems for low-resource languages

• Multilingual dialogue systems

• Dialogue system evaluation

• Machine learning for dialogue systems

• Interaction styles in dialogue systems

However, submissions are not limited to these topics and we encourage you to submit papers in all areas of natural language dialogue systems.

Categories of Submissions:

• Long Research Papers: These are reserved for reports on mature original research results. The expected length of a long paper submission should be in the range of 8-13 pages of content, plus up to 3 pages for references. Final versions (after notification of acceptance) will be given 2 additional pages of content (8-15 pages of content) so that reviewers' comments can be taken into account but the number of pages for references will not change (up to 3 pages).

• Short Research Papers: Authors may choose this category if they wish to report on smaller case studies or ongoing original research efforts. The expected length of a short paper submission should be in the range of 4-7 pages of content, plus up to 2 pages for references. Final versions (after notification of acceptance) will be given 1 additional page of content (4-8 pages of content) so that reviewers' comments can be taken into account but the number of pages for references will not change (up to 2 pages).

• Position Papers: These deal with novel unexplored research ideas or viewpoints which describe trends or fruitful starting points for future research and elicit discussion. The expected length of a position paper submission should be 2 pages of content, plus up to 2 pages for references. Final versions (after notification of acceptance) will be given 1 additional page of content (2-3 pages of content) so that reviewers' comments can be taken into account but the number of pages for references will not change (up to 2 pages).

• Demo Submissions – System Papers: Authors who wish to demonstrate their system may choose this category and provide a description of their system and demo. The expected length of a demo/system paper submission should be up to 5 pages of content, plus up to 2 pages for references. Final versions (after notification of acceptance) will be given 1 additional page of content (up to 6 pages of content) so that reviewers' comments can be taken into account but the number of pages for references will not change (up to 2 pages).

As usual, a selection of accepted papers will be published in post-workshop proceedings.

We welcome demonstrations from the authors of long and short papers which can be shown during the demo session. At the submission time, you will have an option to indicate whether the paper will be accompanied by a demonstration. 

Special Sessions:

In addition, IWSDS 2023 will host two special sessions. Authors can submit papers to either of these using the same procedure as the regular papers but selecting the specific session during the submission process.

Multi-Party Conversational AI:

The program of IWSDS 2023 will include a special session on multi-party conversational AI, where more than two agents are involved in a conversational interaction. The objectives of this session are to review work done in the past in the field of multi-party conversational AI, to showcase recent and ongoing work, and to identify paths forward. Topics of interest are (but are not limited to): designing social state representations and models for multi-party interactions, addressee identification, speaker diarization, common ground detection, transformers for multi-party dialogue, datasets and simulators for multi-party dialogue, reinforcement learning for managing multi-party dialogue, handling split utterances (user utterances split between dialogue turns and utterances of other speakers), anaphora and ellipsis resolution in multi-party dialogue, multimodal input and output in multi-party dialogue systems, monitoring conversation status (sentiment analysis, detection of (dis)agreements and misunderstandings, etc.), methods and metrics for evaluating multi-party dialogue systems.

Dialogue Systems for Multilingual and Under-resourced Language Speakers:

Current dialogue systems target mostly monolingual and high resource languages and their speakers. However, millions of speakers around the world (e.g., India, Africa, Europe as well as indigenous and immigrant communities in the US) are multilingual and it is normal for these speakers and communities to switch within or across languages in daily lives (Doğruöz et al., 2021; Sitaram et al., 2019). In addition, most languages of the world are still under-resourced. Therefore, there is a need for dialogue systems to be more inclusive and target both the multilingual and under-resourced languages and their speakers. The aim of this special session is to bring together researchers from the SDS community and encourage research and discussion around the unique challenges (e.g., data collection, model building, sociolinguistic aspects and system evaluation) for multilingual and under-resourced languages.

Submission:

Authors of all papers (including papers submitted to the special sessions) are requested to submit PDF files of their manuscripts using the IWSDS 2023 paper submission system:

https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/IWSDS2023

(authors must have a Microsoft CMT account to submit a paper).

IWSDS 2023 requires that all authors wishing to present a paper take into account:

• The paper is substantially original, i.e., it has not been published and will not be published in an archival venue.

• If the paper is submitted or will be submitted elsewhere during the IWSDS 2023 review period this should be noted during submission (including the venue where the paper is or will be submitted) using a footnote on the title page of the submission.

• The paper does not contain any plagiarism.

• The paper will be presented by one of the authors in person or virtually according to the schedule published. Any paper accepted in the technical program, but not presented will be withdrawn from the official conference proceedings. Virtual presentations may entail submitting a video presentation rather than presenting live remotely (this will be decided based on the number of papers accepted and other constraints, see also note 2 below).

NOTE 1: All submitted papers are subject to single-blind review (authors are known to reviewers, reviewers are not known to authors).

NOTE 2: The main workshop venue is in person, however because of uncertainties regarding visas, disease, and travel planning more generally, we will allow a hybrid option in which people can participate remotely through Zoom and shared documents. However, the schedule will be set up to maximize the value of the in person participation. 

Templates for formatting are available below:

Latex Style and Template: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1mnzjvTlIVEsdPb2IZXbzxU8WRJj3mLiJ

Word Template: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1WmO9iLvJtO0cH1E0VSC1bPsC0vRDpzbd

Important Dates:

(All deadlines are at 23:59 UTC-12, Anywhere on Earth)

The paper submission system is now open: https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/IWSDS2023 (authors must have a Microsoft CMT account to submit a paper)

Special session and workshop proposals submission deadline: September 20, 2022

Special session and workshop notifications: September 29, 2022

Paper title, author, and abstract submission deadline: October 28, 2022 - extended to November 1, 2022

(Title, authors, and abstract cannot be changed after November 1, PDF can be updated until November 8)

Paper (PDF) update deadline: November 4, 2022 - extended to November 8, 2022

Author notifications: December 16, 2022

Camera ready papers due: January 20, 2023 - extended to January 30, 2023

Workshop: February 21-24, 2023