The First International Workshop on Search-Oriented Conversational AI (SCAI)

at ICTIR 2017, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, October 1, 2017.

http://scai.info
Twitter: @scai_workshop
Paper Submission Deadline: **August 15**

[**new**] Topics for panel discussion: https://app.sli.do/event/i0line8v/ask
Consider submitting a question for panel discussion and / or vote for
existing proposals.

[*new(ish)*] Students who are authors of accepted papers can apply for a travel
grant sponsored by Google


**GOALS**
There is a gradual shift towards searching and presenting the
information in a conversational form. Chatbots, personal assistants in
our phones and eyes-free devices are being used increasingly more for
different purposes, including information retrieval and exploration.
On the other side, information retrieval empowers dialogue systems to
answer questions and to get context for assisting the user in her
tasks.  With the recent success of deep learning in different areas of
natural language processing, this appears to be the right foundation
to power search conversationalization. Yet, we believe more can be
done for theory and practice of conversation-based search and
search-based dialogues. This workshop aims to bring together
AI/DeepLearning and search/IR specialists to lay the ground for it and
establish future directions and collaborations.


**TOPICS OF INTERESTS**
- Surfacing search results in form of a dialogue (how to present
information that search gives us in a form of a dialogue and ensure
smooth transition between dialog turns? Which model to use for
dialog-state tracking?)
- Evaluation of Search-Oriented Conversational AI — From
Conversational AI to Personal Assistants (how to maintain a stable and
consistent assistant behavior?)
- The role of personalization for Conversational AI and for its
evaluation (users are different — can we personalize their
experience?)
- Deep Learning for Conversational AI
- (Deep) Reinforcement Learning for Conversational AI
- Voice as Input (when we consider not only text input, but also voice
interactions with the agent — how will it affect existing models?)


**IMPORTANT DATES**
There will be two series of submissions:
- Submission Deadline: August 15
- Notification: September 1
- Deadline for camera-ready version: September 15


**SUBMISSIONS**
Submission should be between two and six pages in the ACM format to
the following address: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=scai17

We explicitly seek the following types of papers:
- early experimental results
- preliminary results of convai.io competition
- conceptual papers featuring proposals for the panel discussion and
breakout sessions


**INVITED SPEAKERS**
- Dilek Hakkani-Tür, Google Research, Mountain View
- Filip Radlinski, Google Research, London
- Michele Galley, Microsoft Research, Redmond
- ... (more to be announced)


**ORGANIZERS**
- Mikhail Burtsev (MIPT)
- Aleksandr Chuklin (Google Research Europe)
- Julia Kiseleva (UserSat.com & University of Amsterdam)
- Alexey Borisov (Yandex & University of Amsterdam)

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