Call for papers
Multilinguality is one of the key challenges in spoken human-machine interaction. Popular voice assistants such as Alexa and Google Assistant offer interaction in a limited number of languages. However, their approaches often rely on language-specific technology development. Research endeavors are even more limited as they mostly focus solely on English, e.g., the popular model GPT-3 is not available in any other language. Furthermore, most available dialogue research corpora only focus on English or Chinese. However, only less than 5 % of the world population have English as their first language (less than 12 % have Chinese) and among the top 10 languages, many are not represented by today's dialogue systems.
Voice, though, is one of the primary means of communication and provides access not only to commercial services but also to humanitarian and other non-profit services. These dialogue systems are required to converse in many different languages which needs to be reflected in research and development of such systems.
The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers from the different disciplines (incl. NLP, HCI, Dialogue) to give them a forum to exchange ideas and identify common problems, to create synergy effects, and generally to advance the field of multilingual processing. Invited are all submissions that target structured approaches related to multilingual dialogue systems and their individual components. This includes, but is not limited to, the following topics:
- pre-processing / translation for dialogue systems
- approaches for low-resource settings in dialogue systems
- multilingual representations in dialogue systems
- multilingual dialogue system components (e.g., NLU, state tracking, NLG) and multilinguality-by-design
- multilingual dialogue generators
- evaluation of multilingual systems and their components
- multilingual data sets for dialog systems and annotation schemas
- multilinguality in commercial dialogue systems
Submission information
Submission are managed together with IWSDS submissions. More information on submissions is available at the IWSDS website.Important dates
- Submission deadline: July 2, 2021
- Acceptance notification: August 12, 2021
- Camera-ready deadline: September 10, 2021
- Special session date: During IWSDS (November 15-17, 2021)
Organizers
- Wolfgang Maier, Mercedes-Benz AG
- Stefan Ultes, Mercedes-Benz AG