SIGDIAL (Laila Dybkjær)
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REPORT ON SIGDIAL ACTIVITIES

SIGdial is the ACL Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue which was
formed in November 1997. This report covers the period from August 1999 to
September 2000.

The first SIGdial elections were held in the summer of 1999. As a result of
the elections and subsequent nominations, SIGdial is now being run by the
following team: President: Laila Dybkjær; Vice President: David Traum;
Secretary: Barbara di Eugenio; Science Advisory Committee: Akira Shimazu,
Jennifer Chu-Carroll, Morena Danieli, Diane Litman, Michael Strube, and Jan
van Kuppevelt; Information Officer: Pamela Jordan; AAAI Liaison: Diane Litman;
ACL Student Liaison: Lisa Harper; CHI Liaison: David Novick; ESCA/ISCA
Liaison: Roberto Pieraccini; ICSLP/ISCA Liaison: Julia Hirschberg;
Bibliography Committee: Florence Reeder,  Guido Boella, Carol Van Ess Dykema,
David Traum, Marilyn Walker, and Rebecca Walther.

During the past year several workshops with strong relations to the SIGdial
field of interest have been endorsed by SIGdial:

August 2, 1999: IJCAI Workshop on Knowledge and Reasoning in Practical
Dialogue Systems (Stockholm, Sweden).
November 5-7, 1999: AAAI Fall Symposium on Psychological Models of
Communication in Collaborative Systems (North Falmouth, Massachusetts, USA).
March 20-22, 2000: AAAI Spring Symposium, My Dinner with R2D2: Natural
Dialogues with Practical Robotic Devices (Stanford, California).
May 4, 2000: Workshop on Conversational Systems, NAACL/ANLP (Seattle,
Washington, USA).
May 29, 2000: From spoken dialogue to full natural interactive dialogue:
Theory, empirical analysis and evaluation, LREC 2000 (Athens, Greece).
June 15-17, 2000: Götalog 2000: 4th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics
of Dialogue (Göteborg University, Sweden).
July 3-5, 2000: Third Workshop on Human-Computer Conversation (Bellagio,
Italy).
October 7-8, 2000: ACL2000: 1st SigDial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue
with theme session on Principles For Dialogue System Evaluation (Hong Kong).
November 3-5, 2000: AAAI Fall Symposium, Building Dialogue Systems for
Tutorial Applications (North Falmouth, MA, USA).

The first SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue is now reality and will
be held as a two day post-conference workshop in conjunction with ACL 2000 in
Hong Kong. 18 papers have been selected for presentation at the workshop which
will include sessions on annotation and corpus work, prosody and dialogue,
discourse, cooperation, dialogue management, dialogue systems and tools, and
evaluation. The organisers of the workshop are Laila Dybkjær, Koiti Hasida,
and David Traum backed by a strong group of colleagues on the program
committee.

The web site and mailing list which had so far been hosted and maintained by
SIGdial at IET, USA, had to be moved in spring 2000. The mailing list is now
hosted by Loria, Nancy, in France and maintained by Laurent Romary. When the
web site had to be moved it also had to be given a new url. In order to avoid
changing urls in the future the domain name sigdial.org was bought. For the
moment www.sigdial.org is hosted by NISLab in Denmark. The calendar and events
pages are maintained by Pamela Jordan, University of Pittsburgh, USA, whereas
all other web pages are maintained by Laila Dybkjær and staff at NISLab. A new
membership database has been implemented very recently to provide more
functionality and to allow for more information about the individual member.
For the moment SIGdial has +200 members.

A flyer on SIGdial has been produced and will be distributed for the first
time at ACL 2000 and at the first SIGdial workshop. The aims of the flyer are
to make SIGdial more visible, attract more members, and encourage more
activity in the area.