The workshop will feature two special themes and one special session, for which submissions are encouraged. The papers to the special themes and sessions will be evaluated according to the same quality standards as the main conference papers but the authors should indicate that their paper is for the special theme/session so that one of the reviewers can be assigned as a representative of the special theme/session.

Theme: Multi-Domain Dialog Systems

As agents expand in their ability to carry on a dialog with users, we see the emergence of multi-domain systems, that enable users switch from one domain to another during the course of their interaction. This session will discuss, but is not limited to: system architectures, passing the floor, assessment.

Organisers:

• Maxine Eskenazi
• Dilek Hakkani-Tur

Theme: Evaluation of Human-Robot Dialog in Social Robotics

Social dialog is crucial for active and engaging human-robot/agent interaction. There remains a lack of a coherent framework for social dialogs as well as a mechanism to evaluate them from the Human-Robot/Agent point of view. As these machines increasingly assist humans in many tasks, we must carefully evaluate our technology and prioritize the use of ethical considerations in the design of these emergent systems. This session will discuss, but is not limited to: empathic system, social dialogs, evaluation and benchmarking of dialog for robot’s social behavior, ethics.

Organisers:

• Laurence Devillers
• A. Kumar Pandey

Session: Chatbots and Conversational Agents

Chat-oriented dialogue systems have been gaining a lot of popularity in both research and commercial arenas. From the commercial stand point, they seem to be providing an excellent means to engage users by giving a more human-like appearance to established vertical goal-oriented dialogue systems. From the research perspective, on the other hand, they pose interesting challenges and problems to the research community. This session will discuss, but is not limited to: chat-oriented dialogue, natural language understanding and generation, common sense and reasoning, and data collections, resources, user studies and system evaluations for chat-oriented dialogue.

Organisers:

• Zhou You
• Rafael E. Banchs
• David Traum