Workshop topic

The Young Researchers' Roundtable on Spoken Dialog Systems is an annual workshop designed for students, post docs, and junior researchers working in research related to spoken dialogue systems in both academia and industry. The roundtable provides an open forum where participants can discuss their research interests, current work and future plans. The workshop is meant to provide an interdisciplinary forum for creative thinking about current issues in spoken dialogue systems research, and help create a stronger international network of young researchers working in the field. The workshop is co-located with ACL 2008 and will occur the day after the 9th SIGdial workshop.

Workshop Format

Workshop events will include small informal discussion groups, a larger Question & Answers style discussion with senior researchers from academia and industry, and an opt-in demo presentation session. There will also be time for participants to have informal discussions over coffee with senior researchers on potential career opportunities. The small discussion groups are intended to allow participants to exchange ideas on key research topics, and identify issues that are likely to be important in the coming years. The results of each discussion group will then presented and discussed in plenary sessions. The topics for discussion are still open and will be determined by participant submissions and finalized online before the workshop. Potential participants should submit a short paper, as described below in the submission process to get accepted to the workshop.

In addition to the traditional one day event, a half day extension on the topic of Frameworks and Grand Challenges for Dialog System Evaluation is under consideration for the morning of June 22nd, 2008. The aim of this extra extension is to provide an opportunity for dialog systems researchers to discuss issues of evaluation, and hopefully determine an agenda for a future evaluation event or framework. Organization of this extended event will depend on interest; we therefore, as described below, invite potential participants to indicate their interest with their YRR08 submission.

Submission Process

We invite participation from students, post docs, and junior researchers in academia or industry who are currently working in spoken dialog systems research. We also invite participation from those who are working in related fields such as linguistics, psychology, or speech processing, as applied to spoken dialogue systems. Please note that by 'young researchers' the workshop's organizers mean to target students and researchers in the field who are at a relatively early stage of their careers, and in no way mean to imply that participants must meet certain age restrictions.

Potential participants should submit a 2-page position paper and suggest topics for discussion and whether they would be interested in attending the extended session on Sunday morning. A template and specific submission instructions will be available here on March 1. Submissions will be accepted on a rolling basis from that day until the maximum number of participants for the workshop (50) is reached, or until the submission deadline (May 10th 13th, 2008) is reached. Proceedings from previous years' workshops are also available on our web site. Specific questions can be directed to the organizing committee at the mail address below.

Please send comments to yrr08-organizers _AT_ googlegroups _DOT_ com