Young Researchers Discuss Dialog

BY HUA AI

The Young Researchers' Roundtable on Spoken Dialog Systems (http://www.yrrsds.org) is an annual workshop designed for students, post docs, and junior researchers working in research related to spoken dialogue systems in both academia and industry. The roundtable provides an open forum where participants can discuss their research interests, current work and future plans. The workshop is meant to provide an interdisciplinary forum for creative thinking about current issues in spoken dialogue systems research, and help create a stronger international network of young researchers working in the field. The first Young Researchers' Roundtable on Spoken Dialog Systems was organized in 2005 by the Dialog on Dialogs group based at Carnegie Mellon University. The Roundtable was met with great enthusiasm on the part of its 20 participants, and resulted in a successful day of creative brainstorming fuelled by the diverse backgrounds of those involved. Moreover, participants enjoyed networking with their peers in a relaxed environment. Since the first workshop was such a success, two succeeding workshops were held in Pittsburgh, USA in 2006 and in Antwerp, Belgium in 2007.

This year, the workshop was held on June 21st and 22nd, 2008 in Columbus, Ohio, as a satellite workshop to ACL 2008. The workshop began with a one-hour introductory session in which participants briefly introduced themselves and their research. After the opening session, the participants were divided into three small discussion groups in which they exchanged ideas on key research topics. The three discussion topics in the morning sessions were (a) dialog strategy learning and dialog design, (b) next killer-apps, and (c) multimodal dialog systems. Another set of three small group discussions were held in the afternoon on (a) empirical dialog system development approach, (b) how to make spoken dialog systems human-like, and (c) rapid dialog system development. After each group discussion, participants gathered together to summarize their findings. The summarization slides can be found on the workshop website.

This year's workshop featured a new session – the industry talks. Simona Gandrabur from Nuance, Tobias Gobel from VoiceObjects, and Jason Williams from AT&T talked about their research projects as well as general skill requirements of working in typical industry research labs. Since most of the workshop participants were students in universities, this session offered them an opportunity to learn more about the industrial labs so that they could better prepare themselves if they were interested in industry jobs. Another popular session was the senior researcher panel session that was started last year. Tim Paek from Microsoft Research, Alex Rudnicky from Carnegie Mellon University, and David Schlangen from University of Potsdam were invited to answer participants' questions on career path building and long term career planning. After these sessions, the first day of workshop ended with a group dinner at a local Ethiopian restaurant.

On the second day, there was a special session on "Frameworks and Grand Challenges for Dialog System Evaluation". The participants discussed the possibilities of holding shared-task competitions for different interested groups based on the type of dialog system, e.g., information providing dialog systems, multimodal dialog system, and so on. Mailing lists were formed for these interested groups. More details can be found at the workshop website.

The co-organizers of the next year's workshop were recruited from this year's participants. The time and the location of the next year's event will be decided by these new co-organizers in Mid-October.