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. It will also provide a forum for discussing recent papers and talks with 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. Perhaps most importantly, the event will help to create a more permanent international network of young researchers working in spoken dialog systems.

This workshop will be a full-day event consisting of multiple small-group discussions of topics that will be chosen based on suggestions submitted by the participants themselves. Potential roundtable discussion topics could include:

-	What are best practices for conducting and evaluating user studies of spoken dialog systems?
-	How can the user be made aware of the capabilities and limitations of a spoken dialog system?
-	Spoken dialog systems and robots: what are the issues and challenges?
-	What skills must a dialog agent have to be able to engage in a multi-participant conversation?
-	Where can spoken dialog systems have a significant impact in the world?
-	What are best practices for rapidly deploying dialog systems in the real world?
-	Should human-computer communication mimic human-human communication?
-	How can a dialog system learn from its own experience automatically?

After the small-group discussions, each of the groups will present a summary to the rest of the participants. We hope that the discussion format will foster creative thinking about current issues in spoken dialog systems research, setting the stage for the co-located conferences SIGdial and INTERSPEECH-2005.

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 paper following the template provided below. The paper will include a statement of research interests, an overview of past, current and future work, a discussion of what you consider to be the most compelling issues in spoken dialog systems, and 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.

Submission templates: Word, LaTeX zip-file, LaTeX tgz-file

Call for participation: PDF download, TXT download

You can also download a poster annoucement, suitable for message boards: PDF download