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 Interspeech 2009 and will occur the day after SIGdial 2009.

Workshop Format

The 2009 workshop will be a 2-day event. The first day will comprise an introductory session, a senior researcher panel with both academic and industry panellists, and two group discussion sessions. During the one-hour introductory session, participants will briefly introduce themselves and their research.

After the opening session, all the participants will stay together for the senior researcher panel. We intend to invite similar numbers (probably 2-3) of senior researchers from both academia and industry to answer participants questions on career path building and long term career planning. Afterwards, participants will be split into discussion groups (three groups for the target size of 30-50 participants; the precise number of groups is subject to change depending on the number of attendees). Each group will be assigned a dialogue research issue to discuss; these topics will be chosen based on interests expressed during the submission process.

Potential Roundtable discussion topics could include: the effects of the speech channel in human-computer communication, the prosody of conversation, best practices for conducting and evaluating user studies of spoken dialogue systems, statistical methods in dialogue systems, design of gestures for conversational avatars, or cultural adaptation of dialogue strategies. The discussion groups will have two hours to discuss the topic, after which the entire group will reconvene and each group will make a short summary presentation. On the second day there will be a demo and poster session, providing a space for students to present their current work and results. We will also continue and expand last year's discussion on evaluation, exploring various aspects of SDS evaluation frameworks: "Frameworks and Grand Challenges for Dialogue System Evaluation".

Contact: yrr09...@googlegroups.com