Call for Demonstrations and Breaking News

The WatchDial Demonstrations and Breaking News Program is intended to foster discussion and the exchange of ideas among researchers and practitioners from academia and industry by presenting work in progress, dialogue systems and research prototypes of such systems, including their capabilities and workings. Accepted demonstrations and breaking news will be allocated one time slot of 1.5 or 2 hours during the workshop program, and will have a short paper included in the proceedings.

Timetable for Authors

• July 3, 2020: Submission deadline (short paper and video or slides) due.
• July 6, 2020: Notifications of acceptance or rejection sent to authors.
• July 11, 2020: Camera-ready copy due. Registration deadline.

Topics for Interest

The Demonstrations and Breaking News Program welcomes presentations of systems on all topics of the main WatchDial session, including, but not limited to:

• the dynamics of agents' information states in dialogue
• common ground/mutual belief
• goals, intentions and commitments in communication
• turn-taking and interaction control
• semantic/pragmatic interpretation in dialogue
• dialogue and discourse structure
• categorisation of dialogue phenomena in corpora
• child-adult interaction
• language learning through dialogue
• gesture, gaze, and intonational meaning in communication
• multimodal dialogue
• interpretation and reasoning in spoken dialogue systems
• dialogue management
• designing and evaluating dialogue systems

The demonstrations and breaking news must present new ideas, which are not already established in mainstream publications, presentations or services. However, the presentation need not run solely at the conference site; it is all right if it has been showcased elsewhere in the recent past. Captivating demonstrations will be given an advantage in the review process.

Submissions from everyone, including authors of short and long talks at the WatchDial main session, are encouraged. 

Author Registration

Registration for WatchDial is open. At least one author per presentation must be registered by July 11. For further details, please visit https://www.brandeis.edu/nasslli2020 .

• Final demo and breaking news talk paper submission will close at 11:59 PM PDT on July 2, 2020.

Submission and Review Process

Authors are required to submit two items: (1) a 2-page short paper describing their system or theme for the lighting talk, formatted in ACL two-column style, and for the demo, (2) a video (of duration up to 10 minutes) of the proposed demonstration. Slides are also permitted in lieu of video, but greater weight will be given to demonstrations accompanied by videos. The paper must present the technical details of the demonstration or project, discuss related work, and describe the significance of the demonstration or project.  

• Style sheets (Latex, Word) are available here: http://acl2020.org/downloads/acl2020-templates.zip

• The Overleaf template is also available here: https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/acl-2020-proceedings-template/zsrkcwjptpcd

To submit, please email to nasslli@brandeis.edu with the subject line “WatchDial Demo/News submission”

Submissions will be judged for clarity, the significance of the proposed demonstration, and its relevance to the SemDial community.