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Call for papers
Workshop Title: Conversational AI: “Today's Practice and Tomorrow's Potential”
Workshop Website: http://alborz-geramifard.com/workshops/nips18-Conversational-AI
Workshop Date: December 7th
Workshop Location: Montreal, Canada
Submission: https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/CONVERSATIONALAI2018
Deadline: October 25th, 11:59 PM EST
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Description:
In the span of only a few years, conversational systems have become commonplace. Every day, millions of people use natural-language interfaces such as Siri, Google Now, Cortana, Alexa and others via in-home devices, phones, or messaging channels such as Messenger, Slack, Skype, among others. At the same time, interest among the research community in conversational systems has blossomed: for supervised and reinforcement learning, conversational systems often serve as both a benchmark task and an inspiration for new ML methods at conferences which don't focus on speech and language per se, such as NIPS, ICML, IJCAI, and others. Research community challenge tasks are proliferating, including the seventh Dialog Systems Technology Challenge (DSTC7), the Amazon Alexa prize, and the Conversational Intelligence Challenge live competitions at NIPS (2017, 2018).

Following the overwhelming participation in our NIPS workshop last year (9 invited talks, 26 submissions, 3 orals papers, 13 accepted papers, 37 PC members, and couple of hundreds of participants), we are excited to continue promoting cross-pollination of ideas between academic research centers and industry. The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners in this area, to clarify impactful research problems, share findings from large-scale real-world deployments, and generate new ideas for future lines of research. This workshop will include invited talks, contributed work, and open discussion. In these talks, senior technical leaders from both academia and industry will give insights into real usage and challenges at scale. We will prioritize forward-looking papers that propose interesting and impactful contributions. We will end the day with an open discussion, including a panel consisting of academic and industrial researchers.

Invited Speakers:
• Maxine Eskenazi (Carnegie Mellon University)
• Milica Gasic (University of Cambridge)
• Mari Ostendorf (University of Washington)
• Lazaros C Polymenakos (IBM)
• Alexander Rudnicky (Carnegie Mellon University)
• Ruhi Sarikaya (Amazon)

Co-chairs:
• Alborz Geramifard (Amazon)
• Jason Williams (Apple)

Organizers:
• Y-Lan Boureau (Facebook)
• Maxine Eskenazi (CMU)
• Milica Gašić (University of Cambridge)
• Jim Glass (MIT)
• Dilek Hakkani-Tur (Amazon)
• Larry Heck (Samsung)
• Lazaros C Polymenakos (IBM)
• Steve Young (Apple)