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Workshop on Collecting and Generating Resources for
Chatbots and Conversational Agents - Development and Evaluation

Workshop Description

Although non goal-oriented dialogue systems have been around for many years (almost fifty years indeed, if we consider Weizenbaum's Eliza system as the starting milestone), they have been recently gaining a lot of popularity in both research and commercial arenas. From the commercial stand point, non goal-oriented dialogue seems to be providing an excellent means to engage users for entertainment purposes, as well as to give a more human-like appearance to established vertical goal-oriented dialogue systems.

From the research perspective, on the other hand, this kind of systems poses interesting challenges and problems to the research community. The main objective of the workshop is to bring together researchers working on problems related to chat-oriented dialogue for promoting discussion and knowledge sharing about the state-of-the-art and novel techniques in this field, as well as to coordinate a collaborative effort to collect/generate data, resources and evaluation protocols for future research in this area.

Topics of Interest

This workshop invites original research contributions on all aspects of non goal-oriented dialogue, including closely related areas such as knowledge representation and reasoning, language generation, and natural language understanding, among others. In this sense the workshop will invite for both long and short paper submissions in areas including (but not restricted to):

Paper Format and Submissions

Paper submissions to RE-WOCHAT should follow the LREC 2016 paper submission policy. In accordance with LREC policy, papers are not required to be anonymous. Both full papers (8 pages) and short papers (4 pages) are welcomed. Paper submissions must be done in electronic format through the following website https://www.softconf.com/lrec2016/RE-WOCHAT/

Important Dates

Share your LRs! Initiative and ISLRN Number

Describing your LRs in the LRE Map is now a normal practice in the submission procedure of LREC (introduced in 2010 and adopted by other conferences). To continue the efforts initiated at LREC 2014 about "Sharing LRs" (data, tools, web-services, etc.), authors will have the possibility, when submitting a paper, to upload LRs in a special LREC repository. This effort of sharing LRs, linked to the LRE Map for their description, may become a new "regular" feature for conferences in our field, thus contributing to creating a common repository where everyone can deposit and share data.

As scientific work requires accurate citations of referenced work so as to allow the community to understand the whole context and also replicate the experiments conducted by other researchers, LREC 2016 endorses the need to uniquely Identify LRs through the use of the International Standard Language Resource Number (ISLRN, www.islrn.org), a Persistent Unique Identifier to be assigned to each Language Resource. The assignment of ISLRNs to LRs cited in LREC papers will be offered at submission time.