News – Stefan Ultes

[April 2022] I have accepted an offer from University of Bamberg to become their new professor for Language Generation and Dialogue Systems starting in September.
[March 2022] Juliana’s Journal Paper “When to Say What and How: Adapting the Elaborateness and Indirectness of Spoken Dialogue Systems” has been accepted by the open access journal Dialogue & Discourse.
[January 2022] Congratulations to Dr. Nicklas Rach for defending his PhD thesis!
[December 2021] Congratulations to Dr. Juliana Miehle for defending her PhD thesis!
[November 2021] I will be Program Co-Chair of the NLP4ConvAI Workshop co-located with ACL 2022.
[August 2021] Ye’s paper on “Empathetic Dialogue Generation with Pre-trained RoBERTa-GPT2 and External Knowledge” has been accepted to IWSDS 2021.
[July 2021] Congratulations to Niklas for winning the best paper award for his work on argumentative dialogue at SIGDIAL 2021!
[July 2021] Ye’s paper on “Naturalness Evaluation of Natural Language Generation in Task-oriented Dialogues using BERT” has been accepted to RaNLP 2021.
[July 2021] Our journal paper “User Satisfaction Reward Estimation Across Domains: Domain-independent Dialog Policy Learning” got accepted to the open-access journal Dialogue & Discourse.
[May 2021] Our papers on “Blending Task Success and User Satisfaction: Analysis of Learned Dialogue Behaviour with Multiple Rewards” and “From Argument Search to Argumentative Dialogue: A Topic-independent Approach to Argument Acquisition for Dialogue Systems” have been accepted to SIGDIAL 2021.
[April 2021] Niklas and colleague’s journal paper “EVA 2.0: Emotional and Rational Multimodal Argumentation between Virtual Agents” has been accepted to IT.
[January 2021] Niklas and colleague’s journal paper “Estimating Subjective Argument Quality Aspects from Social Signals in Argumentative Dialogue Systems” has been accepted to IEEE Access.
[October 2020] Together with Svetlana Stoyanchev, I am Program Chair of IWSDS 2021.
[June 2020] Niklas’s paper on “Increasing the Naturalness of an Argumentative Dialogue System through Argument Chains” has been accepted to COMMA 2020 as short paper.
[June 2020] The position paper on “Towards meaningful, grounded conversations with intelligent agents” that I have written together with Alex Papangelis has been accepted to RoboDial 2.0, a special session at SIGDIAL 2020.
[June 2020] Our provocation paper on “On the Complexity in Task-oriented Spoken Dialogue Systems” has been accepted to CUI 2020
[May 2020] Our paper on “Similarity Scoring for Dialogue Behaviour Comparison” has been accepted to SIGDIAL 2020 (watch the talk).
[February 2020] Louisa, Juliana, and Niklas have their papers accepted at LREC 2020.
[November 2019] I have been attending the NSF Future Directions Workshop: Toward User-Oriented Agents: Research Directions and Challenges. Update: The final report is out.
[September 2019] My paper on “Improving Interaction Quality Estimation with BiLSTMs and the Impact on Dialogue Policy Learning” has been a best paper finalist at SIGDIAL 2019 (watch the talk).
[November 2018] I have been attending the Shonan meeting on “Multimodal Agents for Ageing and Multicultural Societies”.
[October 2018] Pawel’s paper “MultiWOZ – A Large-Scale Multi-Domain Wizard-of-Oz Dataset for Task-Oriented Dialogue Modelling “ has won Best Ressource Paper at EMNLP 2018.
[July 2018] Our paper on “Addressing Objects and Their Relations: The Conversational Entity Dialogue Model” has been a best paper finalist at SIGDIAL 2018 (watch the talk).