Call for Papers

WOCHAT 2026: Workshop on Chatbots and Agentic Technologies - Co-located with SIGDIAL 2026

The Workshop on Chatbots and Agentic Technologies (WOCHAT 2026) invites submissions on the next generation of conversational systems. As dialogue technologies evolve from reactive responders into agentic, collaborative, and socially aware systems, WOCHAT aims to provide a focused venue for advancing the scientific foundations of these emerging paradigms.

We welcome contributions that explore how conversational agents can reason, plan, coordinate, and interact across modalities and contexts, moving beyond surface-level dialogue toward deeper intelligence.

🎯 Topics of Interest

We invite submissions on topics including, but not limited to:

• Agentic dialogue systems (goal-driven interaction, planning, memory, autonomy)

• Multi-agent conversational systems (coordination, negotiation, communication)

• Multimodal dialogue and grounding (integration of text, speech, vision, and context)

• Dialogue systems in complex domains (e.g., finance, healthcare, legal, cultural heritage, cybersecurity)

• Emotion and affect modeling beyond basic categorical representations

• Commonsense reasoning and theory of mind in dialogue

• Robustness, safety, and trustworthiness in conversational AI

• Human–AI interaction and collaborative intelligence

• Reproducibility and benchmarking in dialogue research

• Evaluation methodologies for dialogue systems, including:

  • • Higher-order reasoning and coherence

    • Cultural competence and social awareness

    • Explainability and causality
      
      

📝 Submission Guidelines

• Submissions must follow the same formatting guidelines and LaTeX template as SIGDIAL 2026, i.e.,  All submissions must adhere to the two-column ACL format (Overleaf template and downloadable LaTeX/Word templates available). 

• Papers must be anonymous and comply with double-blind review requirements.

• All submissions should present original, unpublished work and must not be under review elsewhere.

• Content Essential for Review: All content crucial for understanding your contribution or assessing its technical correctness should be included in the main paper, not solely in appendices. Reviewers are not obligated to review appendices.

• Supplementary Materials: Authors are encouraged to submit supplementary materials like corpora, code, videos, or sound files to ensure reproducibility and/or enhance their submissions.

• Multiple Submissions Policy: SIGDIAL 2026 cannot accept work that is currently under review, or has been published elsewhere, including other conferences or journals with overlapping review periods.
  
  

📄 Submission Types

• Long papers (archival, full research contributions - Max 8 pages including references)

• Short papers (work-in-progress, position papers, or system descriptions - Max 4 pages including references)
  
  

📅 Important Dates

• Paper submission deadline: June 1st, 2026 (AoE)

• Notification of acceptance: June22th, 2026

• Camera-ready papers due: June 29th, 2026

• Workshop date:  August 2nd, 2026
  
  

📤 Submission Site

Papers must be submitted via EasyChair: 👉 WOCHAT2026 (Workshop on Chatbots and Agentic Technologies 2026) 

👥 Target Audience

WOCHAT 2026 is intended for researchers and practitioners in:

• Dialogue systems and conversational AI

• Natural language processing

• Multi-agent systems

• Human–AI interaction

• Affective computing and evaluation science