DSTC9 Workshop @ AAAI-21

Workshop Information

DSTC9 Workshop will be held at AAAI-21 on February 8-9, 2021 as a two-day virtual event.

The AAAI-21 online registration is available at https://aaai.org/Conferences/AAAI-21/registration/.

Workshop Program - Day 1

February 8 (1 pm to 8:30 pm) in San Francisco & February 9 (5 am to 12:30 pm) in Beijing

* Please note that all times on the following schedule are in Pacific Time (UTC-8).


13:00-13:10 Opening Welcome Remarks, Chulaka Gunasekara [slides]


Track 1: Beyond Domain APIs: Task-oriented Conversational Modeling with Unstructured Knowledge Access

(Chair: Seokhwan Kim)

13:10-13:45 Track 1 Overview - Beyond Domain APIs: Task-oriented Conversational Modeling with Unstructured Knowledge Access Track in DSTC9, Seokhwan Kim, Mihail Eric, Behnam Hedayatnia, Karthik Gopalakrishnan, Yang Liu, Chao-Wei Huang, Dilek Hakkani-tur [slides]

13:45-14:10 Towards Generalized Models for Beyond Domain API Task-oriented Dialogue, Haitao Mi, Qiyu Ren, Yinpei Dai, Yifan He, Jian Sun, Yongbin Li, Jing Zheng, Peng Xu

14:10-14:35 Learning to Select External Knowledge with Multi-Scale Negative Sampling, Huang He, Hua Lu, Siqi Bao, Fan Wang, Hua Wu, Zheng-Yu Niu, Haifeng Wang

14:35-15:00 RADGE: Relevance Learning and Generation Evaluating Method for Task-oriented Conversational System, Liang Tang, Qinghua Shang, Kaokao Lv, Zixi Fu, Shijiang Zhang, Chuanming Huang, Zhuo Zhang


15:00-15:20 Break


Track 2: Multi-domain Task-oriented Dialog Challenge II

(Chair: Jinchao Li)

15:20-15:55 Track 2 Overview - Multi-Domain Task Completion Dialog Challenge II at DSTC9, Jinchao Li, Qi Zhu, Lingxiao Luo, Lars Liden, Kaili Huang, Shahin Shayandeh, Run-Ze Liang, Baolin Peng, Zheng Zhang, Swadheen Shukla, Ryuichi Takanobu, Minlie Huang, Jianfeng Gao [slides]

15:55-16:20 Efficient Dialogue State Tracking by Masked Hierarchical Transformer, Min Mao, Jiasheng Liu, Jingyao Zhou, Haipang Wu

16:20-16:45 AuGPT: Dialogue with Pre-trained Language Models and Data Augmentation, Jonáš Kulhánek, Vojtech Hudecek, Tomáš Nekvinda, Ondrej Dusek

16:45-17:10 A Hybrid Task-Oriented Dialog System with Domain and Task Adaptive Pretraining, Boliang Zhang, Ying Lyu


17:10-17:30 Break


Invited Talk 1

17:30-18:30 Invited Talk - Generation Based Conversational AI, Pascale Fung


Poster Session 1

18:30-19:20 Poster Session: Track 1&2


Panel Discussion

19:30-20:30 Panel Discussion: Role of Research Challenges in shaping Conversational AI Research - Hindsight and Foresight

Moderator: Abhinav Rastogi

Panelists: Chiori Hori, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Koichiro Yoshino, Rafael E. Banchs

Workshop Program - Day 2

February 9 (1 pm to 7:50 pm) in San Francisco & February 10 (5 am to 11:50 am) in Beijing

* Please note that all times on the following schedule are in Pacific Time (UTC-8).


13:00-13:05 Welcome Remarks, Chulaka Gunasekara [slides]


Track 3: Interactive Evaluation of Dialog

(Chair: Shikib Mehri)

13:05-13:40 Track 3 Overview - Interactive Evaluation of Dialog Track at DSTC9, Shikib Mehri, Yulan Feng, Carla Gordon, Seyed Hossein Alavi, David Traum, Maxine Eskenazi [slides]

13:40-14:05 WeChat AI's Submission for DSTC9 Interactive Dialogue Evaluation Track, Zekang Li, Zongjia Li, Jinchao Zhang, Yang Feng, Jie Zhou

14:05-14:30 A Unified Pre-training Framework for Conversational AI, Siqi Bao, Bingjin Chen, Huang He, Xin Tian, Han Zhou, Fan Wang, Hua Wu, Haifeng Wang, Wenquan Wu, Yingzhan Lin


Invited Talk 2

14:30-15:30 Invited Talk - Self Learning for Conversational AI, Gokhan Tur


15:30-15:50 Break


Track 4: SIMMC: Situated Interactive Multi-Modal Conversational AI

(Chairs: Paul Crook, Satwik Kottur, Suengwhan Moon)

15:50-16:25 Track 4 Overview - Situated Interactive Multimodal Conversations (SIMMC) Track at DSTC9, Paul Crook, Satwik Kottur, Suengwhan Moon, Ahmad Beirami, Alborz Geramifard, Eunjoon Cho, Rajen Subba [slides]

16:25-16:50 Joint Generation and Bi-Encoder for Situated Interactive MultiModal Conversations, Xin Huang, Chor Seng Tan, Yan Bin Ng, Wei Shi, Kheng Hui Yeo, Ridong Jiang, Jung Jae Kim

16:50-17:15 A Response Retrieval Approach for Dialogue Using a Multi-Attentive Transformer, Matteo Antonio Senese, Giuseppe Rizzo, Alberto Benincasa, Barbara Caputo

17:15-17:40 TOM : End-to-End Task-Oriented Multimodal Dialog System with GPT-2, Younghoon Jeong, Se Jin Lee, Youngjoong Ko, Jungyun Seo


17:40-18:00 Break


Future DSTC & Closing

18:00-18:40 DSTC10 Challenge Proposals

(Chair: Koichiro Yoshino)

18:40-18:50 Wrap-up Talk, Yun-Nung (Vivian) Chen [slides]


18:50-19:00 Break


Poster Session 2

19:00-19:50 Poster Session: Track 4 & DSTC10 Proposals

Important Dates

  • Paper submission deadline: Nov 17, 2020

  • Paper acceptance notification: Dec 3, 2020

  • Camera-ready submission deadline: Dec 18, 2020

  • AAAI early registration deadline: Jan 15, 2021

  • DSTC9 workshop @ AAAI: Feb 8-9, 2021