## Call for Papers

## AISB Symposium on Conversational Artificial Intelligence (SoCAI)
## Submission Deadline: 28 January, 2020

We will be holding a one day Symposium on Conversational Artificial Intelligence (SoCAI) as part of the 2020 conference of the Society for Artificial Intelligence and Simulated Behaviour (AISB), taking place at St. Mary's University in London on 6-9 April 2020. Our goal is to bring together researchers, developers, commentators, and others involved in or interested in the unfolding advent of language-using machines in order to discuss progress, prospects, and impediments in this area.

## Submissions

We invite submissions of papers addressing topics that are, in a broad sense, related to conversational AI. Submissions may include research papers, technical reports, system descriptions, reports on works-in-progress, papers exploring theoretical issues in developing conversational AI technology, reports on industrial experience in the field, and discussions of the philosophical and social issues surrounding the development and deployment of conversational AI. Topics of interest include (but are by no means limited to):

- dialogue modelling
- machine learning approaches to conversational AI
- rules-based approaches
- speech processing and interpretation
- intent and entity classification
- interpretation of multiple intents in single utterances
- named entity recognition
- dialogue management
- multi-turn dialogue
- response generation
- domain specific systems
- general conversational systems
- assembling and analysing data for conversational AI
- semantic context and speech-to-text
- referential semantics in conversational AI
- pragmatics and conversational AI
- embodied conversational agents
- theoretical linguistics in relation to AI
- philosophical, ethical, and social issues
- industrial experiences in conversational AI

## Important Dates:

submission deadline: 17:00 GMT, 28 January, 2020
notification: 21 February, 2020
camera-ready final drafts: 28 February, 2020
conference: 6-9 April, 2019 (exact date of our symposium TBD)

## Keynote Speaker:
Prof. Alex Lascarides
Chair in Semantics, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh

We're very pleased to announce that our keynote speaker will be Alex Lascarides. Prof. Lascarides holds a Chair in Semantics at the University of Edinburgh's School of Informatics, and has been involved with the University since her time as a Master's student. Her research addresses formal semantic and pragmatic accounts of language, encompassing theoretical and computational approaches to modelling the ways that humans communicate with one another in their environments. She has been involved in a number of past and present projects funded by research organisations across Europe, including Segmented Discourse Representation Theory, the Semantics of Gestures, and Strategic Conversation. Her technical and philosophical perspectives on the way that both humans and non-human agents use language to accomplish goals in the world will provide a foundation for an engaging day of presentations and discussions about the current state-of-the-art and the future of conversational AI.

## Website

For submissions guidelines and more details, please visit our website:
https://socai-aisb.github.io/