The 2nd FutureDial Challenge - Dialog Systems with Retrieval Augmented Generation: Call for Participation (co-located with SLT 2024) December, 2024 Macao, China Website: <http://futuredial.org/>   **Overview** Developing intelligent dialog systems has been one of the longest running goals in AI. Significant progress has been made in building dialog systems with deep learning methods and more recently with large language models. However, there are still full of challenges toward building future dialog systems. Following the success of the 1st FutureDial challenge (SereTOD), co-located with EMNLP 2022 (<http://seretod.org/>), we organize the 2nd FutureDial challenge, to further promote the study of how to empower dialog systems with **RAG (Retrieval augmented generation)**. We will release a new dialog dataset, MobileCS2, in both Chinese and English versions. The dataset originates from real-life customer-service logs from China Mobile.   The challenge includes two tracks:                              \* Track 1: Information retrieval based on knowledge bases and dialog context \* Track 2: Dialog systems with retrieval augmented generation   **Topics of interest** \- Retrieval augmented dialog systems \- Information retrieval \- Grounded dialog systems with unstructured knowledge sources \- Large language model (LLM) based dialog systems \- Holistic AI technologies and applications \- Semi-supervised dialog systems \- Reinforced dialog systems \- Evaluation of dialog systems \- Dialog-related datasets and language resources \- General topics for dialog systems   **Important Dates** April 9, 2024: Registration opening for challenge April 20, 2024: Training data release May 9, 2024: Registration deadline for the challenge May 31, 2024: Evaluation data release June 10, 2024: Entry submission deadline June 20, 2024: Evaluation results announced June 20, 2024: SLT paper submission due June 27, 2024: SLT paper update due August 30, 2024: Notification of paper acceptance December 2-5, 2024: SLT2024 Workshop Date (in-person)   **Venue** The FutureDial-RAG challenge will be co-located with SLT 2024, which is to be held from December 2nd - 5th, 2024, in the vibrant city of Macao, China. More information about SLT 2024 can be found at the website: <https://2024.ieeeslt.org/>   **Registration Details** To register for the challenge, please visit the challenge website at <http://futuredial.org/> to download the entry form, fill the form, and send an email to FutureDialRAG (at) gmail (dot) com to complete the registration.   **Organizers** Junlan Feng, China Mobile Zhijian Ou, Tsinghua University Yi Huang, China Mobile Jiangjiang Zhao, China Mobile Online Services Si Chen, China Mobile Yucheng Cai, Tsinghua University   For any questions, please feel free to contact: FutureDialRAG (at) gmail (dot) com   Looking forward to your participation!