Call for Participation

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The Eighth Dialog System Technology Challenge (DSTC8)
Call for Participation 
Website: https://sites.google.com/dstc.community/dstc8
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Background
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The DSTC shared tasks have provided common testbeds for the dialog research community since 2013.

From its sixth edition, it has been rebranded as "Dialog System Technology Challenge" to cover a wider variety of dialog related problems.

For this year's challenge, we opened the call for track proposals and selected the following four parallel tracks by peer-reviews:
- End-to-end Task Completion
- NOESIS II: Predicting Responses
- Audio Visual Scene-Aware Dialog
- Schema-Guided State Tracking

Participation is welcomed from any research team (academic, corporate, non-profit, government).

 
Important Dates
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- Jun 17, 2019: Training data is released
- Sep 23, 2019: Test data is released
- Oct 6, 2019: Entry submission deadline
- Nov 2019: Paper submission deadline
- Spring 2020: DSTC8 workshop (venue: TBD)

 
DSTC8 Organizing Committee
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- Seokhwan Kim - Amazon Alexa AI, USA
- Michel Galley - Microsoft Research AI, USA
- Chulaka Gunasekara - IBM Research AI, USA
- Sungjin Lee - Microsoft Research AI, USA

 
DSTC8 Track Organizers
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End-to-end Task Completion Dialog Challenge
- Adam Atkinson, Hannes Schulz, Kaheer Suleman, Layla El Asri, Mahmoud Adada, Shikhar Sharma, Wendy Tay (Microsoft Research in Montreal)
- Jianfeng Gao, Sungjin Lee, Xiujun Li (Microsoft Research AI)
- Minlie Huang (Tsinghua University)

NOESIS II: Predicting Responses, Identifying Success, and Managing Complexity in Task-Oriented Dialogue
- Chulaka Gunasekara, Luis Lastras (IBM Research AI) 
- Walter S. Lasecki, Jonathan K. Kummerfeld (University of Michigan)

Audio Visual Scene-Aware Dialog Track
- Chiori Hori, Anoop Cherian, Tim K. Marks (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories)

Scalable Schema-Guided Dialogue State Tracking
- Abhinav Rastogi, Amir Fayazi, Raghav Gupta, Ulrich Rueckert, Jindong Chen (Google AI)


DSTC Steering Committee
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- Koichiro Yoshino - Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST), Japan 
- Luis Fernando D'Haro - Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain 
- Chiori Hori - Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL), USA 


Contact Information
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Join the DSTC mailing list to get the latest updates about DSTC8: 
- To join the mailing list: visit https://groups.google.com/a/dstc.community/forum/#!forum/list/join
- To post a message: send your message to list@dstc.community
- To leave the mailing list: visit https://groups.google.com/a/dstc.community/forum/#!forum/list/unsubscribe

For specific enquiries about DSTC8: 
Please feel free to contact any of the Organizing Committee members directly.