Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue

Abstract

We are glad to pen the first few words for the proceedings of SIGDIAL 2021, the 22nd Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue. The SIGDIAL conference is a premier publication venue for research in discourse and dialogue. This year, the conference is organized as a hybrid event with both in-person and virtual participation on July 29-31, 2021, right before ACL-IJCNLP 2021. The 2021 Young Researchers' Roundtable on Spoken Dialog Systems (YRRSDS 2021) is also held as a satellite event. The SIGDIAL 2021 program features three keynote talks, 6 paper presentation sessions, 1 demo session, and 2 special sessions, entitled "Summarization of Dialogues and Multi-Party Meetings", and "Safety for E2E Conversational AI".COVID has changed the way we work, but it doesn't hamper our research progress. We received 142 submissions this year, comprising 88 long papers, 49 short papers, and 5 demo descriptions. We had 12 Senior Program Committee (SPC) members who were each responsible for 11-12 papers, leading the discussion process and also contributing meta-reviews. Each submission was assigned to an SPC member and received at least three reviews. Decisions carefully considered the original reviews, meta-reviews, and discussions among reviewers facilitated by the SPCs. We are immensely grateful to the members of the Program Committee and Senior Program Committee for efforts in providing excellent, thoughtful reviews of the large number of submissions. Their contributions have been essential to selecting the accepted papers and providing a high-quality technical program for the conference. We have aimed to develop a broad, varied program spanning the many positively rated papers identified by the review process. We accepted 59 papers in total: 40 long papers (45%), 15 short papers (31%), and 4 demo descriptions, for an overall acceptance rate of 41.5%, in line with prior years. One keynote will highlight each of the three days of the conference. In organizing this hybrid inperson/virtual conference, we have tried to maintain as much of the spirit of a fully online conference as possible. Recordings for all papers and demos have been made available several days before the start of the conference, for participants to watch asynchronously. Long and short papers are organized into sessions taking into consideration the presenters' time zones. Regular papers sessions span 8-11 papers, each presented as a two-minute pre-recorded talk followed by five minutes of live Q&A. For demos, we organized four parallel zoom rooms to allow participants to interact with and observe live interactions with the systems. The topics represent the breadth of research in discourse and dialogue. A conference of this size requires the energy, guidance, and contributions of many parties, and we would like to take this opportunity to thank and acknowledge them all. We thank our three keynote speakers, Julia Hirschberg (Columbia University), Raymond J. Mooney (University of Texas at Austin), and Jason Weston (Facebook AI & NYU), for...