Special Sessions

Three Special Sessions have been collocated with IWSDS 2018:

EMPATHIC: Special Session on empathic dialog systems for elderly assistance

The proposed challenge is how to provide personalized advice guidance through a spoken dialogue system to improve the quality of life and independency living status of the elderly. The session will discuss, but is not limited to: affective computing in dialog, user centered design, policies dealing with shared user-manager goals, strategies to keep the user engaged, personalization and adaptation, ontologies and knowledge representation, etc.

HUMIC-DIAL: Special Session on designing humour in HCI with focus on dialogue technology

Humour is pervasive in human social relationships and one of the most common ways to produce a positive affect in others. In this special session, we aim to explore challenges in designing, developing and evaluating humorous interactions, as well as benefits and downsides of using humour in interactive tasks with artificial entities with special focus on natural language dialogue.

WOCHAT: Workshop on Chatbots and Conversational Agent Technologies

This is the fifth event of a Workshop and Special Session Series on Chatbots and Conversational Agents. This series aims at bringing together researchers working on problems related to chat-oriented dialogue for promoting discussion and knowledge sharing about the state-of-the-art and recent approaches. It includes a collaborative shared task effort to collect and generate data, resources and evaluation for future research in this area.