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Second Workshop on Chatbots and Conversational Agent Technologies

Workshop Technical Program

• 09:00 - 09:10 - Welcome message and workshop introduction by the organizers


• 09:10 - 10:00 - Keynote Speech by Justine Cassell, Carnegie Mellon University
  • Designing Bots and Other Systems that Can Hold up their End of the Conversation


• 10:00 - 10:40 - Shared Task Reports (6-minute presentations, including Q&A)
  • Shared Task on Data Collection and Annotation
  • A Subjective Evaluation of Chatbot Engines
  • Wochat Chatbot User Experience Summary
  • Sammy: a Friendly English/French/Italian Assistant
  • Regular Expression Based Agents for Online Collection of Human-Chatbot Interactions
  • An Online Platform for crowd-Sourcing Data from Interactions with Chatbots
  • Expert-generated vs. Crowd-sourced Annotations for Evaluating Chatting Sessions


• 10:40 - 11:00 - Coffee break


• 11:00 - 12:20 - Research Paper Presentations (20-minute presentations, including Q&A)
  • Collecting Better Training Data using Biased Agent Policies in Negotiation Dialogues
  • Lexical Acquisition during Dialogues through Implicit Confirmation for Closed-Domain Chatbots
  • Transforming Chatbot Responses to Mimic Domain-specific Linguistic Styles
  • System-response Retrieval Models for Open-domain and Casual Conversational Agent


• 12:20 - 13:40 - Lunch break


• 13:40 - 15:00 - Research Paper Presentations (20-minute presentations, including Q&A)
  • Targeted Sentiment Analysis: Identifying Student Sentiment Toward Courses and Instructors
  • Automated Questions for Chat Dialogues with a Student Office Virtual Agent
  • Prototyping Radiobots - Automatic Radio Talks Generator Considering Live Feedback
  • A Dataset of Operator - client Dialogues Aligned with Database Queries for End-to-end Training


• 15:00 - 15:20 - Coffee break


• 15:20 - 16:00 - Research Paper Presentations (20-minute presentations, including Q&A)
  • On Dialogue Breakdown: Annotation and Detection - dialogue breakdown detection challenge
  • The DialPort Portal: Grouping Diverse Types of Spoken Dialog Systems


• 16:00 - 16:30 - Discussion Session on Chat-oriented Dialogue Resources and Evaluation


• 16:30 - 16:40 - Concluding Remarks by the organizers

Program Committee

• Björn Schuller, Imperial College London, UK
• David Suendermann, Educational Testing Service (ETS), USA
• Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Microsoft Research, USA
• Gabriel Skantze, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
• Haizhou Li, Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore
• Jason Williams, Microsoft Research, USA
• Jiang Ridong, Agency for Science, Technology and Research, Singapore
• Justine Cassell, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
• Kristiina Jokinen, University of Helsinki, Finland
• Kotaro Funakoshi, Honda Research Institute, Japan
• Laurence Devillers, LIMSI-CNRS, France
• Luis D'Haro, Agency for Science, Technology and Research, Singapore
• Luisa Coheur, Lisbon University, Portugal
• Matthew Henderson, Google Research, USA
• Michael McTear, University of Ulster, UK
• Mikio Nakano, Honda Research Institute, Japan
• Nick Campbell, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
• Oliver Lemon, Heriot-Watt University, UK
• Ramón López-Cózar, University of Granada, Spain
• Sakriani Sakti, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan
• Satoshi Nakamura, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan
• Seokhwan Kim, Agency for Science, Technology and Research, Singapore
• Sophie Rosset, LIMSI-CNRS, France
• Stefan Ultes, Cambridge University, UK
• Suraj Nair, Technische Universität München, Germany
• Teruhisa Misu, Honda Research Institute, USA
• Tomoki Toda, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan
• Yasuharu Den, Chiba University, Japan
• Shiv Vitaladevuni, Amazon, USA

Shared Task Co-organizers

• Bayan Abu Shawar, Arab Open University, Jordan
• Luis Fernando D'Haro, Agency for Science, Technology and Research, Singapore
• Zhou Yu, Carnegie Mellon University, USA

Workshop Organizers

• Rafael E. Banchs, Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore
• Ryuichiro Higashinaka, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation, Japan
• Wolfgang Minker, Ulm University, Germany
• Joseph Mariani, LIMSI-CNRS, France
• David Traum, University of Southern California, USA