Workshop on Mixed-Initiative ConveRsatiOnal Systems 2021
The increasing popularity of personal assistant systems and smartphones has drawn attention to conversational systems. Thanks to the recent advances in automatic speech recognition and voice generation, conversational systems are largely employed in smart-home devices (e.g., Google Home, Amazon Alexa) as well as wearable devices (e.g., Apple Siri, Microsoft Cortana, Google Assistant).
The 1st Edition of the Workshop on Mixed-Initiative ConveRsatiOnal Systems (MICROS@ECIR2021) aims at investigating and collecting novel ideas and contributions in the field of conversational systems. These systems provide a conversational interface for different tasks ranging from seeking information to performing e-commerce transactions.
MICROS aims to bring together researchers from academia and industry to discuss the challenges and future of conversational systems. The workshop will have a particular focus on mixed-initiative conversational systems. These proactive systems do not simply provide answers but also propose possible interpretations for ambiguous and vague requests, improving the user’s information-seeking experience.
We invite people working on conversational search as well as interactive recommendation to send us their position and research papers. Novel approaches for conversational information seeking that are based on natural language processing and artificial intelligence are also welcome. We encourage submissions on approaches for conversational search, recommendation, evaluation techniques, data creation and curation, as well as domain-specific applications for conversational systems. The workshop will prioritize innovative and impactful contributions, all the accepted papers will be presented as contribution talks and will have the opportunity to be published in the CEUR proceedings. The workshop will also have keynote talks by experienced researchers and a panel discussion to share insights about conversational systems.
Please visit also the Call for Paper
Follow us on Twitter: @micros2021
Time zone: Anywhere on Earth (AoE)
Registration: The authors of workshop papers can use the “Free registration (0 EUR registration fee)” for attending ECIR 2021.
Please follow ECIR registration instructions here
The registration form for you to fill in is here
Free registrations close on March 25, 2021.
Very important: Note that one registration (paid or free) is required for participating in ECIR 2021, so free registration is not the same as no registration.
Very important: Notice that in case you have also a non-workshop paper, and no other co-authors have registered with a paid registration for it, you’ll have to register with a paid registration for that paper by Feb. 5, 2021.
Tom Lotze, Stefan Klut, Mohammad Aliannejadi and Evangelos Kanoulas. “Ranking Clarifying Questions Based on Predicted User Engagement”
Maddalen Lopez de Lacalle, Xabier Saralegi and Inhar Lopez. “NLU by Cross-lingual Transfer Learning and Minimal Annotation Effort: The Case of Basque”
Abhishek Kaushik and Gareth Jones. “A Conceptual Framework for Implicit Evaluation of Conversational Search Interfaces”
Nikolaos Kondylidis, Jie Zou and Evangelos Kanoulas. “Category Aware Explainable Conversational Recommendation for Cold-Start Setting”
The final version of accepted papers will be available on this website before the workshop.
Cominig soon
Papers must be submitted by January 22, 2021 (23:59 AoE) via EasyChair. Submitted papers should be in the Springer LNCS format. The workshop has a single-blind reviewing process, so the submissions can include the name and affiliations of authors.
Submission Page: EasyChair
The following paper categories are welcome:
All accepted works will be presented at the workshop. Moreover, the research papers can be included in an open-access post-proceedings volume of CEUR Workshop Proceedings http://ceur-ws.org/. The workshop results will be published as a summary paper in the proceedings of ECIR 2021 conference, too.
The workshop topics include but are not limited to: