International Workshop on Spoken Dialog System technology - IWSDS 2020

Workshop: Speech Language and Conversation Technologies for Iberian Languages

The general aim of the Spanish Plan for the Advancement of Language Technology is to promote the development of natural language processing, machine translation and conversational systems in Spanish and co-official languages. The main guidelines defined for the Plan include:

increasing the amount, quality and availability of linguistic infrastructure in Spanish and in Spain’s co-official languages;
fostering the language industry by promoting knowledge transfer and internationalization from the research field to that industry;
improving the quality and capacity of public services, integrating natural language processing and machine translation technologies.
supporting creation, standardization and distribution of language resources created by the management activities performed by the public administrations.

In this workshop, we aim to take advantage of the organization of the IWSDS 2020 conference in Madrid to show recent initiatives and studies developed within the framework of the Plan, and define new opportunities for collaboration among academic institutions, Public Administrations and companies.

Objectives

The objectives defined for the workshop are mainly three:

To present recent initiatives, work and studies developed within the framework of the Spanish Plan for the Advancement of Language Technology.
To know recent work related to the use of Iberian Languages for the creation and annotation of dialog corpora and other linguistic infrastructures; development of dialogue systems and their practical applications; domain transfer and adaptation techniques for spoken dialog systems; and experiences using these technologies with other languages that could be replicated for the Iberian languages
To take the IWSDS 2020 conference theme "Conversational Dialogue Systems for the Next Decade" to discuss, propose and set the milestones of future dialogue systems and speech technologies using Iberian Languages.

Topics of interest

Submission of papers showing the application of Spanish and co-official languages in all areas of spoken dialogue systems is encouraged, especially in topics related to the synergies of academic institutions, Public Administrations and companies including

Corpora and other digital resources for interactive applications
Multimodal and machine learning methods
Multilingual dialogue systems
User adaptation: emotion recognition, users’ intention modeling. etc.
Big data and large scale spoken dialogue systems
Methods and architectures to develop dialogue systems
Practical applications of conversational interfaces: education, healthcare, industry, robot applications, etc.
Spoken dialog systems for low-resource languages
Domain Transfer and adaptation techniques for spoken dialog systems
Experiences with other languages that could be replicated for the Iberian languages

Dates and Place

The workshop will follow the same dates defined for the IWSDS 2020 conference (https://www.iwsds.tech/).

Organizers

David Griol Barres. Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. Secretaría de Estado para el Avance Digital. Plan de Impulso de las Tecnologías del Lenguaje. - email: dgriol@inf.uc3m.es. | tlf: 34 679726891
David Pérez Fernández. Secretaría de Estado para el Avance Digital. Plan de Impulso de las Tecnologías del Lenguaje. Director del Plan. - email: DPerezF@mineco.es
Doaa Samy. Secretaría de Estado para el Avance Digital. Plan de Impulso de las Tecnologías del Lenguaje. - email: dasamy@externos-minestad.es
Jerónimo Arenas García. Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. Secretaría de Estado para el Avance Digital. Plan de Impulso de las Tecnologías del Lenguaje - email: jarenas@ing.uc3m.es
María José del Olmo Toribio. Secretaría de Estado para el Avance Digital. Plan de Impulso de las Tecnologías del Lenguaje. - email: mjolmo@mineco.es
María Inés Rodríguez Pelarda. Secretaría de Estado para el Avance Digital. Plan de Impulso de las Tecnologías del Lenguaje. - email: irodriguez@externos-minetad.es
Marta Morales García. Secretaría de Estado para el Avance Digital. Plan de Impulso de las Tecnologías del Lenguaje. - email: mmoralesg@externos-minetad.es
José Ramón Granger Alemany. Secretaría de Estado para el Avance Digital. Plan de Impulso de las Tecnologías del Lenguaje. - email: JRGranger@externos-minetad.es
Juan de Dios Llorens Gónzalez. Secretaría de Estado para el Avance Digital. Plan de Impulso de las Tecnologías del Lenguaje. - email: jdllorens@mineco.es

Tentative program committee

Jerónimo Arenas. Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (Spain)
Zoraida Callejas. University of Granada (Spain)
David Camilo Corrales. INRA (France)
Fernando Fernández-Martínez. Technical University of Madrid (Spain)
David Griol. Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (Spain)
Michael McTear. University of Ulster (United Kingdom)
José Luis Pro. University of Seville (Spain)
José Francisco Quesada. University of Seville (Spain)
Doaa Samy. Autonomous University of Madrid (Spain)
Pablo Sierra. University of Seville (Spain)
Huiru (Jane) Zheng. University of Ulster (United Kingdom)

Tentative program

The workshop will be divided into three main sessions:

In the first one, the main initiatives developed within the Spanish Plan for the Advancement of Language Technology will be presented, with special attention to those related to dialogue systems, linguistic infrastructures and automatic translation. In addition, results of studies and recent work in these research lines will be presented.

In the second part, the papers accepted in the workshop will be presented according to the research lines described in the list of topics.

The last part of the workshop will consist of forum in which the participants will debate about practical experiences related to the application of the main research lines of the Plan, the definition of new collaboration lines, and the search of synergies between academic and research institutions, Public Administration and business centers.