Special Session on Physically Situated Dialogue

July 12, 2018
Poster Session: 13:30 - 14:30
Talks and Panel: 15:00 - 17:15

Overview

Recent technologies have brought conversational robots out of the lab and into the homes and workplaces of real users. Dialogue is now actively taking place with robots and other smart devices to understand, operate, navigate, and manipulate physical space. Physically situated dialogue distinguishes itself from other forms of dialogue in that it (1) takes place in a physical space, (2) refers to the shared surroundings of dialogue partners, and (3) involves a physical agent that can make actions in the world. There is a growing need for showcasing bi-directional dialogue work that draws on language grounding, models of vision and language, as well as dialogue that allows physically situated agents to ask for clarification and provide updates on their internal states.

Schedule

Full paper posters 13:30 - 14:30	A Situated Dialogue System for Learning Structural Concepts in Blocks World Ian Perera, James Allen, Choh Man Teng, Lucian Galescu Pardon the Interruption: Managing Turn-Taking through Overlap Resolution in Embodied Artificial Agents Felix Gervits, Matthias Scheutz Consequences and Factors of Stylistic Differences in Human-Robot Dialogue Stephanie Lukin, Kimberly Pollard, Claire Bonial, Matthew Marge, Cassidy Henry, Ron Artstein, David Traum, Clare Voss Turn-Taking Strategies for Human-Robot Peer-Learning Dialogue Ranjini Das, Heather Pon-Barry
Full paper presentations 15:00 - 16:15	Predicting Perceived Age: Both Language Ability and Appearance are Important Sarah Plane, Ariel Marvasti, Tyler Egan, Casey Kennington Multimodal Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning Policy for Task-Oriented Visual Dialog Jiaping Zhang, Tiancheng Zhao, Zhou Yu Language-Guided Adaptive Perception for Efficient Grounded Communication with Robotic Manipulators in Cluttered Environments Siddharth Patki, Thomas Howard
LBR lightning talks 16:15 - 16:45	Embodied Question Answering Abhishek Das, Samyak Datta, Georgia Gkioxari, Stefan Lee, Devi Parikh, Dhruv Batra Jointly Improving Parsing and Perception for Natural Language Commands through Human-Robot Dialog Jesse Thomason, Aishwarya Padmakumar, Jivko Sinapov, Nick Walker, Yuqian Jiang, Harel Yedidsion, Justin Hart, Peter Stone, Raymond J. Mooney Experiments in Proactive Symbol Grounding for Efficient Physically Situated Human-Robot Dialogue Jacob Arkin, Thomas Howard
Panel Discussion 16:45 - 17:15	Thomas Howard, Casey Kennington, Ian Perera, Heather Pon-Barry, David Traum

Call for Papers

Our objectives in this special session are to showcase recent and ongoing work on physically situated dialogue, and to identify paths forward in this space from research across communities including dialogue, robotics, computer vision, NLP, and AI. The special session will feature presentations, a poster session, and a panel discussion comprising a mix of experts in the topic area. We welcome submissions on any topic related to physically situated dialogue, including but not limited to:

• Interaction studies with smart-home devices
• Learning from demonstration through natural language dialogue
• Explainable AI in physical spaces
• Representations of physical surroundings / world modeling to support grounded communication
• Embodied visual question answering and/or generation
• Empirical studies of human-robot dialogue (Wizard-of-Oz based, simulated, or semi-autonomous)
• Computational models of dialogue management and/or turn-taking with physical agents
• Methods of building or leveraging common ground with physical agents in real-world or simulated environments
• Corpora of physically situated dialogue (Wizard-of-Oz based or otherwise)
• Multimodal information processing to support dialogue (including speech, gaze, gesture)
• Physical embodiment, voice, or personification of robots and their effects on human-robot dialogue
• Communicating feedback from robots using affordances in addition to speech
• Spoken language generation for physically situated dialogue

Researchers may choose to submit:

• Long papers and short papers will present original research and go through the regular SIGdial peer review process by the general SIGdial program committee. These papers will appear in the main SIGdial proceedings and are presented with the main track. Long papers must be no longer than eight pages, including title, text, figures and tables, along with two additional pages for example discourses or dialogues and algorithms. Short papers should be no longer than four pages including title, text, figures and tables, along with one additional page for example discourses or dialogues and algorithms. An unlimited number of pages are allowed for references.
• Late-breaking and work-in-progress papers will showcase ongoing work and focused, relevant contributions. Submissions need not present original work and are limited to four pages including references. These will be reviewed by the special session organizers and posted on the special session website. These papers will be presented as lightning talks or posters during the session. Authors will retain the copyright to their work so that they may submit to other venues as their work matures.

Long and short paper deadline: March 11

Final pdf due March 18

To submit a long or short paper, please go to the SIGDIAL 2018 main page for conference submissions (deadline March 11). When submitting, indicate “Physically Situated Dialogue” as the candidate special session. All long and short submissions must follow the SIGDIAL 2018 format.

Late-breaking and work-in-progress paper deadline: June 10

To submit a late-breaking or work-in-progress paper, please email a 2-4 page PDF (including references) formatted using the SIGDIAL 2018 format guidelines, to: robodial@googlegroups.com by June 10. Submissions should be non-anonymized.

Important Dates

March 11, 2018	Long and short paper initial submission deadline (SIGDIAL submission system)
March 18, 2018	Final pdf due for long and short paper submission
April 20, 2018	SIGDIAL notification of acceptance
May 13, 2018	Camera-ready submission deadline
June 10, 2018	Late-breaking and work-in-progress submission deadline (Email directly to: robodial@googlegroups.com)
July 12-14, 2018	SIGDIAL conference

Organizers

Sean Andrist, Microsoft Research
Stephanie Lukin, Army Research Lab
Matthew Marge, Army Research Lab
Jesse Thomason, University of Texas at Austin
Zhou Yu, University of California, Davis