DEEP-DIAL18: AAAI 2018 Workshop on Reasoning and Learning for Human-Machine Dialogues AAAI 2018 New Orleans, LA, United States, February 1-8, 2018 |
Submission link | https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=deepdial18 |
Submission deadline | November 12, 2017 |
Natural conversation is a hallmark of intelligent systems. Unsurprisingly, dialog systems have been a key sub-area of AI for decades. Their most recent form, chatbots, which can engage people in natural conversation and are easy to build in software, have been in the news a lot lately. There are many platforms to create dialogs quickly for any domain based on simple rules. Further, there is a mad rush by companies to release chatbots to show their AI capabilities and gain market valuation. However, beyond basic demonstration, there is little experience in how they can be designed and used for real-world applications needing decision making under constraints (e.g., sequential decision making). The workshop will thus be timely to help chatbots realize their full potential.
Furthermore, there is upcoming interest and need for innovation in Human-Technology-Interaction as addressed in the context of Companion Technology. Here, the aim is to implement technical systems that smartly adapt their functionality to their users’ individual needs and requirements and are even able to solve problems in close co-operation with human users. To this end, they need to enter into a dialog and should be able to convincingly explain their suggestions and their decision making behavior.
From research side, statistical and machine learning methods are well entrenched for language understanding and entity detection. However, the wider problem of dialog management is unaddressed with mainstream tools supporting rudimentary rule-based processing. There is an urgent need to highlight the crucial role of reasoning methods, like constraints satisfaction, planning and scheduling, and learning working together with them, can play to build an end-to-end conversation system that evolves over time. From practical side, conversation systems need to be designed for working with people in a manner that they can explain their reasoning, convince humans about choices among alternatives, and can stand up to ethical standards demanded in real life settings.
With this motivation, some areas of interest for the workshop, but not limited to, are:
- Dialog Systems
- Early experiences with implemented dialog systems
- Evaluation of dialog systems, metrics
- Open domain dialog and chat systems
- Task-oriented dialogs
- Style, voice and personality in spoken dialogue and written text
- Novel Methods for NL Generation for dialogs
- Reasoning
- Domain model acquisition, especially from unstructured text
- Plan recognition in natural conversation
- Planning and reasoning in the context of dialog systems
- Learning
- Learning to reason
- Learning for dialog management
- End2end models for conversation
- Explaining dialog policy
- Practical Considerations
- Ethical issues with reasoning in dialog systems
- Corpora, Tools and Methodology for Dialogue Systems
The intended audience includes students, academic researchers and practitioners with an industrial background from the AI sub-areas of dialog systems, learning, reasoning, planning, HCI, ethics and knowledge representation.
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Paper preparation instructions
Papers must be formatted in AAAI two-column, camera-ready style (AAAI style files are at: http://www.aaai.org/Publications/Templates/AuthorKit18.zip). Regular research papers, which present a significant contribution, may be no longer than 7 pages, where page 7 must contain only references, and no other text whatsoever. Short papers, which describe a position on the topic of the workshop or a demonstration/tool, may be no longer than 4 pages, references included.
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Important Dates
Oct 13, 2017 Workshop paper submissions due
Nov 09, 2017 Notification to authors
Nov 21, 2017 Camera-ready copies of authors’ papers
Feb 2 or 3, 2018 Workshop date
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Organizers
Biplav Srivastava, IBM Research, USA
Susanne Biundo, University of Ulm, Germany
Ullas Nambiar, Zensar Labs, India
Imed Zitouni, Microsoft AI+R, USA