TUESDAY, JUNE 6 – ARRIVAL
18:00 – 19:00 Registration
19:00 – 21:00 Welcome reception
Activity to Combat Jet Lag – Sunset Watching
Go to the upper deck above the entrance and take a seat!
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 7 – DAY 1 (full day at Summit Inn)
7:30 – 8:50 Breakfast on your own
9:00 -9:15 Welcome
9:15– 10:15 Keynote 1 - Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Google
Recent Advances and Challenges on Deep Learning for Goal Oriented Conversational Understanding
Recent advances in deep learning based approaches enabled exciting new research frontiers for goal-oriented conversation systems. In this talk, I will present an end-to-end dialog system, with components for language understanding, dialogue state tracking, policy, and language generation. These can be independently built and jointly optimized for dialogue quality and efficient task completion using supervised, unsupervised, or reinforcement learning. I will focus on novel aspects of each component, and highlight remaining issues and challenges towards building human-level conversational systems.
10:15 -10:30 SOFTBANK ROBOTICS coffee break
10:30 – 12:00 Paper Session 1 Chair: Diane Litman
10:30 – 10:50 Nurul Lubis, Sakriani Sakti, Koichiro Yoshino and Satoshi Nakamura, Eliciting positive emotional impact in dialogue response selection
10:50 – 11:10 Zahra Rahimi, Diane Litman and Susannah Paletz, Acoustic-prosodic entrainment in multi-party spoken dialogues: Does simple averaging extend existing pair measures properly?
11:10 – 11:30 Svetlana Stoyanchev, Soumi Maiti and Srinivas Bangalore, Predicting interaction quality in customer service dialogs
11:30 – 11:50 Pierrick Milhorat, Divesh Lala, Koji Inoue, Zhao Tianyu, Masanari Ishida, Katsuya Takanashi, Shizuka Nakamura and Tatsuya Kawahara, A conversational dialogue manager for the humanoid robot ERICA
12:00 – 13:00 Lunch
13:00 – 16:55 WOCHAT Special Session
13:00 Special Session Introduction – David Traum
13:20 – 15:00 Oral WOCHAT session – Chair: Wolfgang Minker
13:20 Koh Mitsuda, Ryuichiro Higashinaka and Yoshihiro Matsuo, What information should a dialog system understand? Collection and analysis of perceived information in chat-oriented dialog Long Paper
13:40 Emer Gilmartin, Carl Vogel, Nick Campbell, Benjamin Cowan, Chunks in multiparty conversation - building blocks for extended social talk Short paper
13:55 Jacqueline Brixey and David Novick, Building rapport with extraverted and introverted agents Long Paper
14:15 Geetanjali Rakshit, Kevin Bowden, Lena Reed, Amita Misra and Marilyn Walker, Debbie the Debate Bot of the Future Short Paper
14:30 Hiroaki Sugiyama, Toyomi Meguro and Ryuichiro Higashinaka. Automatic evaluation of chat-oriented dialogue systems using large-scale multi-references Long paper
14:50 – 15:00 Wrapup and concluding remarks from the oral session
15:00 - 15:15 INTERACTIONS coffee break
15:15 – 17:00 Chat session continued
15:15 Shared task report and continuation plans including JSALT proposal – Zhou Yu
15:35 Panel – Moderator, Joseph Mariani
Kevin Bowden, Laurence Devillers, Satoshi Nakamura, Alex Rudnicky, Marilyn Walker, Zhou Yu
16:35 – 17:00 Plenary final WOCHAT discussion including plans for future WOCHAT efforts – Ron Artstein
17:00 – 18:00 Tree House visits
18:00 – 23:00 Dinner
THURSDAY, JUNE 8 – DAY 2 (partial day at Summit Inn & event at Fallingwater/winery)
7:30 – 8:50 Breakfast on your own
9:00 - 10:00 Keynote 2 Joanna Bryson, Princeton and U. Bath
Can language use by artefacts be ethical?
Natural language is expected to be the dominant interface to AI in the near future, in fact this time may already be upon us. While more accessible to most populations than conventional keyboard and screen-based interfaces, natural language carries with it a number of ethical challenges.
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privacy and security: as we open our human communicative contexts to machines that perceive what we do, we allowing intimate information to be communicated over the Internet.
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transparency: using a more human-seeming interface can create a greater illusion of human-like capacities, which may be a moral hazard.
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fairness: learning natural language requires absorbing human culture, which can include stereotypes we wish weren't there.
I will go over each of these, devoting the most time to recent results on bias in NLP in work with Aylin Caliskan and Arvind Narayanan (Science, 2017). I will also discuss measures that can be taken to ameliorate each of these problems, many surprisingly simple, but all requiring good faith effort, potentially backed with government regulation enforcing industry-agreed standards.
10:00 10:15 FACEBOOK coffee break
10:30 – 12:00 Multi-domain Special Session Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Maxine Eskenazi
10:30 – 10:50 Kyusong Lee, Tiancheng Zhao, Stefan Ultes, Lina Rojas-Barahona, Eli Pincus, David Traum and Maxine Eskenazi, An assessment framework for DialPort
10:50 – 11:10 Alexandros Papangelis, Stefan Ultes and Yannis Stylianou, Domain Complexity and Policy Learning in Task-oriented Dialogue Systems
11:10 – 11:30 Alexandros Papangelis and Yannis Stylianou, Single-model Multi-domain Dialogue Management with Deep Learning
11:30 – 11:50 Michael Wessel, Girish Acharya, James Carpenter and Min Yin, An Ontology-Based Dialogue Management System for Virtual Personal Assistants
12:00 – 13:00 Lunch
13:45 Depart for Fallingwater
14:30 Fallingwater check-in
15:00 Fallingwater tours begin
17:00 Depart from Fallingwater for Christian Klay Winery
17:30 – 21:30 Hay ride and banquet at Christian Klay Winery
21:30 Depart Christian Klay Winery to return to Summit Inn (+ bonfire and s’mores)
FRIDAY, JUNE 9 – DAY 3 (half day at Summit Inn, departure)
7:30 – 8:50 Breakfast on your own
9:00 - 10:15 Robots, Evaluation and Ethics Special Session Laurence Devillers, Amit Kumar Pandey
9:00 – 9:20 Juliana Miehle, Ilker Bagci, Wolkgang Minker and Stefan Ultes, A Social Companion and Conversation Partner for the Elderly
9:20 – 9:40 Melanie Garcia, Guillaume Dubuisson-Duplessis, Gabrielle Pittaro, Lucile Béchade and Laurence Devillers, Towards metrics of Evaluation of Pepper robot as a Social Companion for Elderly People
9:40 – 10:00 Onno Kampmann, Farhad Bin Siddique, Yang Yang, and Pascale Fung, Adapting a Virtual Agent to User Personality
10:00 – 10:20 Robots, Evaluation and Ethics Panel Discussion Laurence Devillers, Joana Bryson
10:20 - 10:35 AMAZON ALEXA coffee break
10:35 – 12:10 Poster session Chair: Wolfgang Minker
Louisa Pragst, Wolfgang Minker and Stefan Ultes, Exploring the Applicability of Elaborateness and Indirectness in Dialogue Management
Yukitoshi Murase, Koichiro Yoshino, Masahiro Mizukami and Satoshi Nakamura, Feature Inference Based on Label Propagation on Wikidata Graph for DST
Bethany Lycan and Ron Artstein, Direct and Mediated Interaction with a Holocaust Survivor
Tetsuro Takahashi and Hikaru Yokono, Two person dialogue corpus made by multiple crowd-workers
Patrick Ehrenbrink and Stefan Hillmann, Comparing Priming Effects of Visual and Textual Task Representations - Texts can Influence Users' Utterances
Stefan Ultes, Juliana Miehle and Wolfgang Minker, On the Applicability of a User Satisfaction-based Reward for Dialogue Policy Learning
Manex Serras, María Inés Torres and Arantza Del Pozo, Regularized Neural User Model for Goal Oriented Spoken Dialogue Systems
Robin Ruede, Markus Müller, Sebastian Stuker and Alex Waibel, Yeah, Right, Uh-Huh: A Deep Learning Backchannel Predictor
Zhou Yu, Vikram Ramanarayanan, Patrick Lange and David Suendermann-Oeft, An Open-Source Dialog System with Real-Time User Engagement Coordination for Job Interview Training Applications
12:10 -12:30 Conclusion and Presentation of IWSDS 2018
13:30 Bus departs for Pittsburgh airport