Bridging the Gap: Academic and Industrial Research in Dialog Technologies

Proceedings of the Workshop of NAACL HLT 2007

In the recent years, we have seen rapid adoption of dialog systems in commercial applications. They range from telephone-based services, in-car interactive systems, to online conversational service agents and talking characters in computer games. Openstandard platforms such as VoiceXML have been adopted by the industry, and become the driving force for the faster adoption of dialog applications. 

The widespread dialog applications in industry setting pose challenge for researchers in both industrial and academic worlds. Progress from academic world has not benefited the real world applications to a satisfactory extent. The purpose of this one-day workshop is to provide a forum to bring industrial and academic researchers together to share their experiences and visions in the dialog technology development, and to identify topics that
are of interest to both camps.

There are total 13 papers accepted for resentation at this workshop, with 8 papers for long presentation and 5 for short presentation. These papers are almost evenly divided between the industry and academic communities. In addition, two panels on the related dialog topics have been arranged during the workshop, with distinguished panelists of various backgrounds from academic, industrial, and standardization communities.

We are pleased to the see some real convergence from both industry and academic side. While academic researchers are proposing and building practical dialog systems, industrial researchers are starting to implement sophisticated learning and uncertainty modeling into their system. The scope of this workshop papers ranges from advanced
dialog systems for technical support,  multi-modal methods, to POMDP modeling, reinforcement learning and adaptable dialog architecture.

1 related event

• 8th Human Language Technologies Conference
 


Year	2007
Language	English
Publisher	Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Order:	http://aclweb.org/anthology-ne...
ISBN	2007-04-26-25
Keywords	dialog systems, dialog technology, talking characters, online conversational service agents, dialog applications
Synonym	Conversational Interface