Call for Workshop and Tutorial Proposals

The 27th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL) will be held in Atlanta, Georgia on August 1-5, 2026.

We are pleased to announce the call for workshop and tutorial proposals for SIGDIAL 2026. We encourage proposals on any topic of interest to the discourse and dialogue communities. This program aims to offer new perspectives and foster collaboration among researchers working on related topics. We particularly welcome sessions that bridge the gap between sub-communities within SIGDIAL.

Important Dates

All deadlines are 11:59PM UTC-12:00 (“anywhere on Earth”).

March 2, 2026 Proposal submission deadline
March 16, 2026 Proposal notification
March 30, 2026 Workshop/tutorial initial website
April 6, 2026 First call-for-papers (if applicable)
August 1-2, 2026 Workshops and tutorials
August 3-5, 2026 Main Conference

Topics of Interest

Topics include all aspects related to Dialogue and Discourse, including (but not limited to):

  • Large Language Models (LLMs) and Agentic Frameworks
  • Adversarial Methods and Reinforcement Learning
  • Explainable, Responsible, and Ethical AI
  • Evaluation, Annotation, and Resources
  • Interactive, Multimodal, Situated, and Incremental Systems
  • Applications of Dialogue Systems and Conversational AI

Format

Proposals may be for 0.5 day, 1 day, 1.5 days, or 2 days sessions. We encourage interactive and diverse formats, such as:

  • Oral and/or poster presentations
  • Panel discussions
  • Hackathons or shared tasks
  • A combination of the above

Workshop organizers will be responsible for soliciting, reviewing, and selecting papers or abstracts. Workshop organizers may choose to publish accepted papers in separate proceedings.

Submission Guidelines

Workshop or tutorial proposals should be 2–4 pages and must include the following:

  1. Title and Type: Specify if it is a Workshop or Tutorial.
  2. Organizers: List of organizers and their email addresses.
  3. Sponsors: List of sponsors and funding amounts (if any).
  4. Summary: A brief overview of the topic.
  5. Motivation: Theoretical interest and/or application context.
  6. Logistics: Preferred duration and estimated number of attendees.
  7. Format: Requested session type(s) (e.g., poster, panel, hackathon).

Proposals will be reviewed jointly by the general chair and program co-chairs. Please submit your proposal using the following form: https://forms.gle/6xPaWyAGn15ehnkR9.

Reference Sessions

Proposers may wish to review topics from recent SIGDIAL meetings for inspiration:

  • YRRSDS 2025: Workshop on Spoken Dialogue Systems for PhDs, PostDocs & New Researchers
  • DSTC 2025: Dialog System Technology Challenge
  • Automin 2025: Automatic Minuting Shared Task
  • SDS4CA 2024: Spoken Dialogue Systems for Cybernetic Avatars
  • CS4OA 2023: Workshop on Counter Speech for Online Abuse
  • PracticalD2T 2023: Workshop on Practical LLM-assisted Data-to-Text Generation
  • TamingLLM 2023: Workshop on Taming Large Language Models: Controllability in the era of Interactive Assistants
  • MM-NLG 2023: Workshop on Multimodal, Multilingual Natural Language Generation
  • ICARD 2023: Connecting Multiple Disciplines to AI Techniques in Interaction-centric Autism Research and Diagnosis
  • SDSData 2023: Designing Divergent Agent Tasks for SDS Data Collection