Call for workshop papers
DSTC, the Dialog System Technology Challenge, has been a premier research competition for Dialog Systems since its inception in 2013. This workshop is the 7th edition in the series of DSTC challenges, continuing the shift in DSTC6 to focus on end-to-end dialog tasks, in order to explore the issue of applying end-to-end technologies to Dialog Systems in a pragmatic way. Given the remarkable success of the first six editions of DSTC, we are organizing the seventh edition of DSTC this year.
DSTC7 has the following three tracks:
- Noetic End-to-End Response Selection.
Organized by Lazaros Polymenakos and Chulaka Gunasekara (IBM Research AI, USA), and Walter S. Lasecki and Jonathan K. Kummerfeld (University of Michigan, USA).
This challenge consists of sub-tasks on two datasets, one focused but small (course advising) and the other more diverse but large (Ubuntu support). In each, participants select the correct next utterances from a set of candidates' and even indicate that none of the proposed utterances is a good candidate. The objective is to push utterance classification towards real world problems.
- End-to-End Conversation Modeling: Moving beyond Chitchat - Sentence Generation.
Organized by Michel Galley, Chris Brockett, Bill Dolan, and Jianfeng Gao (Microsoft AI&R).
This track proposes an end-to-end conversational modeling task, where the goal is to generate conversational responses that go beyond chitchat, by injecting informational responses that are grounded
in external knowledge.
- Audio Visual Scene-Aware Dialog (AVSD).
Organized by Chiori Hori and Tim K. Marks (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), and Devi Parikh and Dhruv Batra (Georgia Tech School of Interactive Computing).
This track proposes an end-to-end audio-visual scene-aware dialog system, where the goal is to understand scenes in order to have conversations with the users about the objects and events around them.
For the final evaluation, the test sets will be provided on Sep. 10th and the results will be submitted by Oct. 1st. Currently roughly 190 participants are registered for DSTC7. We will have a 1-day wrap-up workshop at AAAI 2019 to review the state-of-the-art systems, share novel approaches to the DSTC7 tasks, and discuss future directions for dialog technology. We will invite system papers reporting the systems submitted to DSTC7, general technical papers for end-to-end dialog technologies and audio visual semantic understanding, as well as keynote speakers who have developed cutting-edge approaches to data-driven dialog systems. You can find the information of the previous workshop,
DSTC6.
Important Dates
| Paper submission deadline |
5 Nov 2018 (Extended to 16 Nov 2018, 23:59 Pacific Time) |
| Paper acceptance notification |
26 Nov 2018 (Extended to 28 Nov 2018) |
| DSTC7 workshop @ AAAI |
27 January 2019 |
Summary paper: Bibtex reference
We will prepare the challenge summary paper as follows.
@article{DSTC7,
title={The 7th dialog system technology challenge},
author={Koichiro Yoshino and Chiori Hori and Julien Perez and Luis Fernando D'Haro and Lazaros Polymenakos and Chulaka Gunasekara and Walter S. Lasecki and Jonathan Kummerfeld and Michael Galley and Chris Brockett and Jianfeng Gao and Bill Dolan and Sean Gao and Tim K. Marks and Devi Parikh and Dhruv Batra},
journal={arXiv preprint},
year={2018}
}
Paper Format
Submissions should be made via Microsoft-CMT and must follow the formatting guidelines for AAAI-2019 (use the AAAI Author Kit). All submissions must be anonymous and conform to AAAI standards for double-blind review. The papers adhere to the 2-column AAAI format in 7 page long, 6 pages for the contents and remaining 1 page only for the reference, will be considered for review.
Author Kit: https://www.aaai.org/Publications/Templates/AuthorKit19.zip
Submission
Submit you paper through Submission System
Organizing Committee
- Workshop Chair: Chiori Hori, Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL), USA
- Challenge Chair: Koichiro Yoshino, Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST), Japan
- Publication Chair: Julien Perez, Naver Labs Europe, France
- Publicity Chair: Luis Fernando D'Haro, Technical University of Madrid (UPM), Spain
