Workshop topic
The Young Researchers' Roundtable on Spoken
Dialog Systems will bring together students, post docs, and
junior researchers from different countries, different research
institutions, and different disciplines who share an interest in
applied dialog systems research. It will provide a setting in which
participants can discuss their own research and work and obtain
feedback from others who are at a similar level and who are working on
similar problems.
The discussions will have an eye toward (1) solving the problems
participants currently face in their work and (2) identifying issues
that are likely to be important in the coming years. And, perhaps most importantly, (3) the event will help to create a more permanent
international network of young researchers working in spoken dialog
systems.
We hope to continue the success of last year's Young Researchers' Roundtable on Spoken Dialog Systems.
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Use and usefulness of user simulation: What are the best practices for building and evaluating user simulations? |
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Dialogue and question answering: How can dialogue research help with interactive question answering? |
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Multimodality: Today spoken dialog systems are common in call centers, mobile phone,
and cars, but multi-modal systems are much less widely deployed. Why is
this so? Can multimodal dialogue systems play a useful/fun role in
gaming/virtual reality? |
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Para-linguistic and non-linguistic phenomena: How should dialogue systems account for and respond to affect (e.g.,
user frustration)? |
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Bridging the gap: How can research on spoken dialogue systems benfit from other fields? What techniques from other fields (such as operations research,
ergonomics, data mining, or others) might be borrowed and extended to
advance spoken dialog systems? What can linguistic theories and psycho-lingusitic research tell us? |
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Submission process
We invite participation from students, post docs, and junior
researchers who are currently working in applied spoken dialog systems
research. We also invite participation from those who are working in
related fields such as human factors, speech recognition, artificial
intelligence, or speech synthesis, as applied to spoken dialog
systems. Potential participants should submit a 2-page position paper following
the template provided below. The paper
will include a statement of research interests with a short overview of past,
current and future work. Furthermore a discussion on the following questions:
- What is the next killer application for spoken dialog systems?
- What sort of impact could that application have?
- What questions need to be answered before we can realize that application?
This discussion should be followed by an enumeration of three possible discussion topics for the event itself.
Finally the authors are asked to provide a short biographical sketch.
Accepted papers will be collated and distributed
to participants in CD-ROM and/or paper format. We also plan to publish
the position papers and presentations from the workshop on the web,
subject to sponsor or publisher constraints.
Last year's proceedings can be found 
