<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div class="">SIGDIAL 2020</div><div class=""><b class="">July 1-3, 2020 USA</b></div><div class=""><a href="http://www.sigdial.org/workshops/conference21/" class="">http://www.sigdial.org/workshops/conference21/</a></div><div class="">Final Call for Special Sessions</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">The 21st Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL 2020) will be held on July 1-3, 2020 at the Jack’s Urban Meeting Place (JUMP) in Boise, Idaho, USA.<b class=""> </b> SIGDIAL will be temporally co-located with ACL 2020, which will be held on July 5-10 in Seattle, Washington, USA (<a href="https://acl2020.org/" class="">https://acl2020.org/</a>). Conference will take place just before ACL 2020. </div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">IMPORTANT DATES</div><div class=""> Special Session Submission Deadline: <b class="">January 15, 2020</b></div><div class=""> Special Session Notification: January 31, 2020</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">The Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL) organizers welcome the submission of special session proposals. We welcome special session proposals on any topic of interest to the discourse and dialogue communities. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to Role of Discourse in NLP Applications, Explainable AI, Evaluation, Annotation, and End‐to‐end systems.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">A SIGDIAL special session is the length of a regular session at the conference, and may be organized as a poster session, a panel session, a poster session with panel discussion, or an oral presentation session. Special sessions may, at the discretion of the SIGDIAL organizers, be held as parallel sessions.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">The papers submitted to special sessions are handled by the special session organizers, but for the submitted papers to be in the SIGDIAL proceedings, they have to undergo the same review process as regular papers. The reviewers for the special session papers will be taken from the SIGDIAL program committee itself, taking into account the suggestions of the session organizers, and the program chairs will make acceptance decisions. In other words, special session organizers decide what appears in the session, while the program chairs decide what appears in the proceedings and the rest of the conference program.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Submissions</div><div class="">Those wishing to organize a special session should prepare a two-page proposal containing: a summary of the topic of the special session; a list of organizers and sponsors; a list of people who may submit and participate in the session; and a requested format (poster/panel/oral session).</div><div class="">These proposals should be sent to <a href="mailto:conference@sigdial.org" class="">conference@sigdial.org</a> by the special session proposal deadline. Special session proposals will be reviewed jointly by the general chair and program co‐chairs.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Links</div><div class="">Those wishing to propose a special session may want to look at some of the sessions organized at recent SIGDIAL meetings.</div><div class=""><a href="http://www.cs.utep.edu/nigel/deep/" class="">http://www.cs.utep.edu/nigel/deep/</a></div><div class=""><a href="https://robodial.github.io/" class="">https://robodial.github.io/</a></div><div class=""><a href="https://www.sigdial.org/files/workshops/conference18/sessions.htm" class="">https://www.sigdial.org/files/workshops/conference18/sessions.htm</a></div><div class=""><a href="http://articulab.hcii.cs.cmu.edu/sigdial2016/" class="">http://articulab.hcii.cs.cmu.edu/sigdial2016/</a></div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">SIGDIAL 2020 Organizing Committee</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">General chair: Olivier Pietquin (Google Brain, France)</div><div class="">Co-program chairs: Smaranda Muresan (Columbia University, USA)</div><div class=""> Yun-Nung Vivian Chen (National Taiwan University, Taiwan)</div><div class="">Local chair: Casey Kennington (Boise State University, USA)</div><div class="">Sponsorship chair: David Vandyke (Apple, UK)</div><div class="">Mentoring chair: Nina Dethlefs (University of Hull, UK)</div><div class="">Publication chair: Stefan Ultes (Mercedes-Benz Research & Development, Germany)</div></body></html>