The 17th annual Young Researchers’ Roundtable on Spoken Dialogue Systems (YRRSDS) will be held virtually (collocated with SIGdial) on July 27th and 28th, 2021. YRRSDS (http://www.yrrsds.org/) is an annual workshop for graduate students, postdoctoral students, and junior researchers working on spoken dialogue systems in both academia and industry. The workshop serves as an interdisciplinary forum for creative thinking about current issues in spoken dialogue systems research and helps to create an international network of young researchers working in the field. We invite researchers at an early stage of their career (no age limit) to submit a 2-page position paper. This should include their past, present and future work, a short bio, and topic suggestions for discussions. Poster presentation by all participants is expected. However, posters need only present current work and not necessarily be from a published paper. Submission topics include, but are not limited to: • Open domain, task-oriented dialogue, and chat systems • Models of dialogue: statistical, symbolic, and hybrid approaches • Dialogue state tracking and policy learning for dialogue management • Spoken language understanding and natural language generation for dialogue • Evaluation methodology for dialogue systems • Semantics, pragmatics, and context in dialogue systems • Incremental spoken dialogue systems • Situated interaction with virtual and robotic agents • Psycholinguistic influences on dialogue system design • Establishing social relationships and engagement with the user • Data collection and dataset sharing for statistical models • Industry development cycles, requirements, and applications Important Dates Submission open April 1st 2021 Submission deadline June 7th 2021 Acceptance notification July 15 2021 Registration open June 1st 2021 YRRSDS 2020 July 27th-28th 2021 Looking forward to meeting you there! Best wishes, Angus Addlesee, on behalf of YRRSDS 2021 Organizing Committee Angus Addlesee Heriot-Watt University Selina Meyer University of Regensburg Vojtěch Hudeč Charles University Jelte van Waterschoot University of Twente Behnam Hedayatnia Amazon Chitralekha Gupta National University of Singapore Contact email: a.addlesee@hw.ac.uk ________________________________ Founded in 1821, Heriot-Watt is a leader in ideas and solutions. With campuses and students across the entire globe we span the world, delivering innovation and educational excellence in business, engineering, design and the physical, social and life sciences. This email is generated from the Heriot-Watt University Group, which includes: 1. Heriot-Watt University, a Scottish charity registered under number SC000278 2. Heriot- Watt Services Limited (Oriam), Scotland's national performance centre for sport. Heriot-Watt Services Limited is a private limited company registered is Scotland with registered number SC271030 and registered office at Research & Enterprise Services Heriot-Watt University, Riccarton, Edinburgh, EH14 4AS. The contents (including any attachments) are confidential. If you are not the intended recipient of this e-mail, any disclosure, copying, distribution or use of its contents is strictly prohibited, and you should please notify the sender immediately and then delete it (including any attachments) from your system.