Self-organizing Special Interest Group (SIG) Meetings

Call for SIG Meetings

Confirmed SIG Meetings

SIG Meeting Proceedings are available online here.

One of the workshop goals is to increase both intra and inter community interactions. Towards this goal, this year's SLT will host self-organizing special interest group (SIG) meetings. Below contains information on how to propose such events at SLT 2014. If you want to excite the community with the topic you have in mind and have an impact on the workshop content, now this is your chance!

In summary, the goal of SIG meetings is to let people organize their own mini-conference in any format they want, which we call "unconference style". The role of the organizing committee will be to post the SIG abstracts online (for the large ones) and allow people to propose SIG topics at the workshop (for the small or mini SIGs) and make the space/logistics arrangement accordingly. It is the SIG organizers' responsibility to decide on format and content (e.g., whether to have pre- or post-discussions, presentations, within-SIG panel, etc.) in the proposed SIG meeting. So the description of SIGs is open-ended really, and this is intentional to keep it in unconference style. SIG organizers will put together short reports and will also give short update presentation during closing ceremony.

Call for SIG Meetings

Submission of proposals in all areas of spoken language technology listed in Call for Papers (CFP) is encouraged, with emphasis on the workshop technical theme, which is "machine learning in spoken language technology", or other multidisciplinary topics allowing interaction between different communities or technical areas. Organizers will be asked to write a summary report after the event to be posted on the website as well as presented during closing ceremony. For SIG meetings, prospective organizers will have more flexibility to decide on the format of the event (e.g., format can be as formal as having oral presentations, or as informal as having round-table discussions) as well as the technical level (e.g., topics can be technical or not).

Other topics are also welcome: In addition to technical areas, special interest group (SIG) meetings can be organized around any topic that would attract attention from the community (e.g., forming/planning a new challenge or special session at future events), high-level topics such as academia-industry collaborations, etc.

We plan to have two SIG slots, one on Sunday evening after reception, and one Monday evening (8pm-10pm). Current plan is to give 8pm-9pm sessions to oral or large sessions and the 9pm-10pm to small discussion groups (e.g., round-table discussions or in-front-of-the-board discussions or small meeting room discussions). For large SIG meetings there will be 2-3 parallel SIG meetings running from 8pm till 9pm. 9pm-10pm slot will be for informal and much smaller meetings, and people can even propose SIG meetings on the spot and other people can sign-up for that. More information will be provided.

Submission Procedure

Prospective organizers are invited to submit 1 page proposals to sigs@slt2014.org, including below required information (alternative preferences have to be listed)

  • Proposed format of the SIG meeting
  • SIG size
  • Any requests from organizing committee (e.g., logistics)?

SIG proposal submission deadline: November 21, 2014. Acceptance decisions will be finalized as we receive proposals.

Confirmed SIG Meetings

  • "Dialog State Tracking Challenge Results Session"

    Monday, December 8, 8:00-9:30pm

    In spoken dialog systems, dialog state tracking refers to the task of correctly inferring the user’s goal at a given turn, given all of the dialog history up to that turn. The Third Dialog State Tracking Challenge (DSTC) is a research community challenge task for dialog state tracking on a corpus of human-computer dialogs, in which 7 international research groups participated. This is the third instance of this challenge, with previous instances reporting results at SIGDIAL 2013 and SIGDIAL 2014.

    This session will consist of an overview talk -- explaining the task, data, evaluation metrics, and results -- followed by short talks covering each entry. This Monday evening session complements the regular poster session the following morning (Tuesday at 10 AM, “PT2: Dialog Management and State Tracking”) by providing a format conducive for group discussion dedicated to this challenge task. This session is open to all SLT attendees.

    Organizers and contacts: