The 25th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL) will be held in Kyoto, Japan on September 18-20, 2024. SIGDIAL will be co-located with INLG which will take place after SIGDIAL in Tokyo, Japan.

The SIGDIAL venue provides a regular forum for the presentation of cutting-edge research in dialogue and discourse to both academic and industry researchers, continuing a series of 24 successful previous meetings. The conference is sponsored by the SIGDIAL organization - the Special Interest Group in discourse and dialogue for ACL and ISCA.

* Topics of Interest *

We welcome formal, corpus-based, implementation, experimental, or analytical work on discourse and dialogue including, but not restricted to, the following themes:

- Discourse Processing: Rhetorical and coherence relations, discourse parsing and discourse connectives. Reference resolution. Event representation and causality in narrative. Argument mining. Quality and style in text. Cross-lingual discourse analysis. Discourse issues in applications such as machine translation, text summarization, essay grading, question answering and information retrieval. Discourse issues in text generated by large language models. - Dialogue Systems: Task oriented and open domain spoken, multimodal, embedded, situated, and text-based dialogue systems, their components, evaluation and applications, Knowledge representation and extraction for dialogue, State representation, tracking and policy learning. Social and emotional intelligence, Dialogue issues in virtual reality and human-robot interaction. Entrainment, alignment and priming. Generation for dialogue, Style, voice, and personality. Safety and ethics issues in Dialogue. - Corpora, Tools and Methodology: Corpus-based and experimental work on discourse and dialogue, including supporting topics such as annotation tools and schemes, crowdsourcing, evaluation methodology and corpora. - Pragmatic and Semantic Modeling: Pragmatics and semantics of conversations (i.e., beyond a single sentence), e.g., rational speech act, conversation acts, intentions, conversational implicature, presuppositions. - Applications of Dialogue and Discourse Processing Technology.

* Special Session *

SIGDIAL 2024 invites work on the special session “GEMINI - Graph-based knowledge for Modelling Intelligent Natural Interaction” that focuses on knowledge and knowledge modeling for dialogue systems, in particular on the opportunities and challenges for enhancing and stabilizing dialogue capabilities of chatbots, robots, and virtual agents with the use of LLMs.

* Submissions *

The program committee welcomes the submission of long papers, short papers, and demo descriptions. Submitted long papers may be accepted for oral or for poster presentation. Accepted short papers will be presented as posters.

- Long paper submissions must describe substantial, original, completed and unpublished work. Wherever appropriate, concrete evaluation and analysis should be included. Long papers must be no longer than 8 pages, including title, text, figures and tables. An unlimited number of pages is allowed for references and appendices, and an extra page is allowed in the final version to address reviewers’ comments. - Short paper submissions must describe original and unpublished work. Please note that a short paper is not a shortened long paper. Instead, short papers should have a point that can be made in a few pages, such as a small, focused contribution; a negative result; or an interesting application nugget. Short papers should be no longer than 4 pages including title, text, figures and tables. An unlimited number of pages is allowed for references and appendices, and an extra page is allowed in the final version to address reviewers’ comments. - Demo descriptions should be no longer than 4 pages including title, text, examples, figures, tables and references. A separate one-page document should be provided to the program co-chairs for demo descriptions, specifying furniture and equipment needed for the demo.

Note that content that is an important part of the contribution or that is important for the reviewers to assess the technical correctness of the work should be a part of the main paper, and not appear in appendices. Reviewers are not required to consider material in appendices.

Authors are encouraged to also submit additional accompanying materials, such as corpora (or corpus examples), demo code, videos and sound files.

* Multiple Submissions *

SIGDIAL 2024 cannot accept work for publication or presentation that will be (or has been) published elsewhere and that have been or will be submitted to other meetings or publications whose review periods overlap with that of SIGDIAL. Any questions regarding submissions can be sent to program-chairs [at] sigdial.org.

* Blind Review *

Building on previous years’ move to anonymous long and short paper submissions, SIGDIAL 2024 will follow the ACL policies for preserving the integrity of double-blind review (see author guidelines: https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=ACL_Author_Guidelines). Unlike long and short papers, demo descriptions will not be anonymous. Demo descriptions should include the authors’ names and affiliations, and self-references are allowed.

* Submission Format *

All long, short, and demonstration submissions must follow the two-column ACL format, which are available as an Overleaf template (https://www.overleaf.com/read/crtcwgxzjskr) and also downloadable directly (Latex and Word) (https://github.com/acl-org/acl-style-files).

Submissions must conform to the official ACL style guidelines, which are contained in these templates. Submissions must be electronic, in PDF format.

* Submission Deadline *

SIGDIAL will accept regular submissions through the Softconf/START system, as well as commitment of already reviewed papers through the ACL Rolling Review (ARR) system.

* Regular submission *

Authors have to fill in the submission form in the Softconf/START system and upload an initial pdf of their papers before May 17, 2024 (23:59 GMT-11). Details and the submission link will be posted on the conference website (https://2024.sigdial.org/).

Submission via ACL Rolling Review (ARR, https://aclrollingreview.org/)

Please refer to the ARR Call for Papers (https://aclrollingreview.org/cfp ) for detailed information about submission guidelines to ARR. The commitment deadline for authors to submit their reviewed papers, reviews, and meta-review to SIGDIAL 2024 is June 19, 2024. Note that the paper needs to be fully reviewed by ARR in order to make a commitment, thus the latest date for ARR submission will be April 15, 2024.

* Mentoring *

Acceptable submissions that require language (English) or organizational assistance will be flagged for mentoring, and accepted with a recommendation to revise with the help of a mentor. An experienced mentor who has previously published in the SIGDIAL venue will then help the authors of these flagged papers prepare their submissions for publication.

* Best Paper Awards *

In order to recognize significant advancements in dialogue/discourse science and technology, SIGDIAL 2024 will include best paper awards. All papers at the conference are eligible for the best paper awards. A selection committee consisting of prominent researchers in the fields of interest will select the recipients of the awards.

SIGDIAL 2024 Program Committee Vera Demberg and Stefan Ultes Conference Website: https://2024.sigdial.org/