-------- Forwarded Message -------- Subject: [AISWorld] Call for Papers - First Workshop “Towards a new generation of Personalized Intelligent Conversational Agents” (PICA) Date: Fri, 19 Feb 2021 12:24:35 +0000 From: Musi, Elena Elena.Musi@liverpool.ac.uk To: aisworld@lists.aisnet.org aisworld@lists.aisnet.org

================================================================= Call for Papers - First Workshop “Towards a new generation of Personalized Intelligent Conversational Agents” (PICA) 29th ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization (UMAP) Deadline: March 26, 2021 (GMT) pica.cls.ru.nl/ June 2021, Utrecht, NL ================================================================= Recent years have seen the rise of conversational agents (CAs) in everyday life: chatbots that use written communications above all, but also vocal digital assistants. It is safe to say that conversation is becoming a key mode of human-computer interaction. However, despite much recent success in natural language processing and dialogue research, the communication between a human and a machine is still in its infancy. In this context, dialogue personalization could be a key to narrow part of the gap, making sense of users’ features (e.g., preferences, expertise, communication style, emotions, personality) when engaged in a conversation with a machine. Learning user features directly from the dialogue with the chatbot, in order to adapt its response (e.g. the complexity of the explanations) can be an opportunity to improve the interaction with the user, both in commercial chatbots and voicebots offered by companies to their customers and by conversational, recommender systems.

The PICA workshop focuses on both long-term engaging spoken dialogue systems and text-based chatbots, as well as conversational recommender systems. Papers can be about different approaches to this: (pilot) evaluations, design guidelines, personalization, natural language processing, protection of privacy and (health) data, (cognitive) architectures and frameworks, implementations, context analyses. We are also very interested in studies on the effectiveness of behaviour change support systems and changing health related behaviour (such as quit smoking, lose weight, etc.). The main goal of the workshop is to stimulate discussion around problems, challenges, possible solutions and research directions regarding the exploitation of NLP and ML techniques to learn user features and use them to personalize the dialogue in the next generation of intelligent conversational agents.

TOPICS OF INTEREST ==================

Submissions are encouraged but not limited to the following topics:

Applications for personalized dialogues ● Commercial chatbot and voicebot ● Health management systems ● E-learning systems ● Conversational Recommender systems ● Counseling and coaching agents: Methodologies for learning personal data from dialogue ● User modeling and/or memory for long-term engaging dialogues ● NLP technologies for learning from dialogue ● Emotion and mood detection ● Personality detection ● Semantic Content Analysis of Social and Linked Open Data ● Information retrieval and elicitation by agents Methodologies for dialogue personalisation ● NLG for dialogue generation ● Intelligent explanation provision ● Resource and corpora creation Open Issues in Personalized Intelligent Agents ● Ethical issues and privacy management of Personal data ● Need for transparency (e.g., in compliance with GDPR) ● Gathering implicit feedbacks (e.g. social activities) to infer user interests. ● Evaluation of personalized conversational agents ● Trustworthiness, risks of bias in agent conversations ● Engagement and conversational strategies in dialogues ● Self-disclosure of agents

IMPORTANT DATES ==================

* Full paper submission: March 26, 2021 (GMT) * Reviews Due: April 23, 2021 * Paper notification: April 26, 2021 * Camera-ready deadline: May 7, 2021 * PICA 2021 Workshop: June 2021

SUBMISSION INFORMATION ========================

Submissions to the workshop are in the form of a long or short paper and submitted as a PDF file. We accept the following submissions: short (and demo) papers on work in progress, or position papers: 4 pages +1 for references long full research papers (maximum of 8 pages +1 additional page for references)

Papers have to be submitted via the EasyChair conference system (select the ‘Workshop-PICA’ track within EasyChair), must be written in English and contain original material that has not been published or is currently undergoing review elsewhere. Papers are peer-reviewed by a committee of experts in the field. Accepted papers will be listed on DBLP and published via the ACM Digital Library.

Please note that for a contribution to be included in the workshop program, and the corresponding paper to appear in the Proceedings, at least one of its authors must register and attend the workshop to present their contribution.

The paper format should follow the new ACM single-column format, please use the following template:

LaTeX (use \documentclass[manuscript,review,anonymous]{acmart} in the sample-authordraft.tex file for single-column): https://www.acm.org/binaries/content/assets/publications/consolidated-tex-te... MS Word: https://www.acm.org/binaries/content/assets/publications/taps/acm_submission...

More details on the paper formatting can be found at: https://www.um.org/umap2021/call-for-contribution/call-for-papers#submission

Your submission should be close to camera-ready and thoroughly copy-edited due to the short selection cycle. Furthermore, due to the very rapid selection process we cannot offer any extensions to the deadline. Submissions are single blind and should therefore include all author names, affiliations and contact information and references to external data, software or videos, if applicable.

WORKSHOP CHAIRS ==================

Iris Hendrickx – Centre for Language Studies, Radboud University, Netherlands Federica Cena – University of Torino, Italy Erkan Basar – Behavioural Science Institute, Radboud University, Netherlands Luigi Di Caro – University of Torino, Italy Florian Kunneman - Vrije University, Netherlands Elena Musi – University of Liverpool, UK Cataldo Musto – University of Bari, Italy Amon Rapp – University of Torino, Italy Jelte van Waterschoot – Human Media Interaction, University of Twente, Netherlands _______________________________________________ AISWorld mailing list AISWorld@lists.aisnet.org