==========================================================
The Ninth Linguistic and Cognitive Approaches to Dialog Agents (LaCATODA 2024)
(PRICAI 2024 Workshop)

Venue: Kyoto, Japan & online (in conjunction with PRICAI 2024)
==========================================================

Short Description:
A multidisciplinary workshop for researchers who develop more sophisticated dialog agents and methods for achieving more natural machine-generated conversation or study problems of human communication which are difficult to mimic algorithmically.

Workshop Goals:
The more human-like machine intelligence engineers develop, the more important is for them to be familiar with advances in fields traditionally focusing on humans — ethics, psychology, linguistics, or cognitive science. In the age of data explosion, advancing hardware and more powerful learning algorithms, it has been becoming obvious that we need to study mechanisms underlying what we call a natural dialog, how we track a conversation or what we remember. It is not enough to pay attention what information is conveyed but also how it is conveyed. For this reason we extend topics to knowledge-related topics to seek answers to questions like how an utterance can become harmful, amusing, beautiful or interesting. We aim to gather AI researchers who realize that in spite of current popularity of GenAI "chatbots", they are not really dialog systems and it is necessary to extend existing and propose new algorithms to perform natural conversation. We will call for papers regarding research not only on the latest trends but also on revisiting classic studies related to dialog and understanding, as the AI developments allow to utilize theories that had focused on human interaction and understanding in the past. The workshop intends to spark an interdisciplinary discussion on affect in dialog understanding and generation tasks.
------------------------------------------------------------------

Important Dates:
Paper Submission deadline: August 18th, 2024 (11:59PM UTC-12:00, "anywhere on Earth")
Acceptance notification: September 18th, 2024
Camera ready deadline: October 1st, 2024
LaCATODA 2024 Workshop: 19 November 2024



------------------------------------------------------------------

Relevant Topics:
- Affective computing
- Affect-related knowledge acquisition
- Artificial assistants and tutors
- Artificial General Intelligence
- Attention and focus in dialog processing
- Common sense knowledge and reasoning
- Computational cognition
- Daily life assistants
- Emotional intelligence simulations
- Ethical reasoning
- Humor processing
- Language acquisition
- Machine learning for dialog
- Text mining for dialog
- Persona and user modeling
- Philosophy of emotions in communication
- Preference models
- Retrieval-based dialog systems
- Systems and approaches combining above topics

Organizers:
Rafal Rzepka, Hokkaido University, Japan
Michal Ptaszynski, Kitami institute of Technology, Japan
Pawel Dybala, Jagiellonian University, Poland
Siaw-Fong Chung, National Chengchi University, Taiwan
Jordi Vallverdú, Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain