Social influence (SI) is the change in an individual's thoughts, feelings, attitudes, or behaviors from interacting with another individual or a group. For example, a buyer uses SI skills to negotiate trade-offs and build rapport with the seller. SI is ubiquitous in everyday life, and hence, realistic human-machine conversations must reflect these dynamics, making it essential to model and understand SI in dialogue research systematically. This would improve SI systems' ability to understand users’ utterances, tailor communication strategies, personalize responses, and actively lead conversations. These challenges draw on perspectives not only from NLP and AI research but also from Game Theory, Affective Computing, Communication, and Social Psychology.
SI dialogue tasks like negotiation, persuasion, therapy, and argumentation have recently gained traction. Current conversational systems emphasize modeling system strategies using dialogue acts and strategy annotations or modeling users. Prior work also explored related tasks crucial for the eventual development of SI systems, namely outcome prediction, argument mining, and lie detection. However, these efforts are scattered, and only limited efforts focus on building useful systems exhibiting SI skills, such as chatbots. Ensuring AI-driven models’ safety, interpretability, and integration into real-time applications that simulate or analyze SI remains challenging.
We are excited to host the Second Workshop on Social Influence in Conversations (SICon 2024). SICon 2024 will be a one-day hybrid event, co-located with EMNLP 2024 in Miami, Florida on November 16.
October 14, 2024: If you want to present your Findings paper at SICon, please reach out to us at sicon-chairs@googlegroups.com with the Paper Title and a list of author email IDs for all communication.
October 14, 2024: We announced the paper decisions. See List of accepted papers.
August 27, 2024: We released the Invitation for Sponsorship. Please reach out to us if your organization can support our workshop at the earliest.
August 14, 2024: The deadline for direct submissions has been extended to August 29th; and for the shared task papers to September 27th.
August 5, 2024: Check out our GenSICon shared task!
July 27, 2024: The workshop date has been announced: SICon 2024 will take place on November 16, 2024.
July 9, 2024: First Call for Papers is out!
The Second Workshop on Social Influence in Conversations (SICon) will be held at EMNLP 2024 in Miami, Florida on November 15 or 16.
Direct paper submissions
15 August 2024 29 August 2024 - Paper submission deadline
ACL Rolling Review (ARR) submissions
15 August 2024 - Paper submission deadline to ARR
30 September 2024 - Commitment deadlines for ARR papers
02 October 2024 - Notification of acceptance
10 October 2024 - Camera-ready paper submission deadline
16 October 2024 - Presentation material due
Note: all deadlines are 11:59 PM UTC-12:00 (or AoE, “Anywhere on Earth”).
SICon 2024 is sponsored by Sony Interactive Entertainment. A brief introduction about the company can be found here.