Chatbot researchers and practitioners are invited to join CONVERSATIONS 2021, a two-day workshop on chatbot research and design. This is the fifth CONVERSATIONS workshop, where researchers with an interest in chatbots and conversational user interfaces collaborate and share. The workshop is free of charge. Following from the pleasant experience of last year’s virtual event, also CONVERSATIONS 2021 will be fully online.

Date: November 23-24
Location: Virtual online event, hosted by the University of Amsterdam.
Paper submission deadline (extended): September 24

Paper presentations and groupworks are important parts of the workshop, and we encourage researchers and practitioners to submit papers and proposals.

All papers undergo thorough double-blind peer review. Accepted full papers will be included in the workshop proceedings, published in Springer LNCS, and also considered for the workshop Best Paper award.

We accept the following submission categories:

- Full papers: Empirical studies, theoretical contributions, or presentations of design research (8-16 pages, Springer LNCS format) that advance the state-of-the-art. To be presented at the workshop and published in the Springer workshop proceedings.
- Position papers: Preliminary results, work in progress or author positions on open issues (3-6 pages, Springer LNCS format). To be presented at the workshop and published at the workshop webpage.
- Groupwork proposals: Proposals for 2-hour groupwork sessions at the workshop. May for example concern design exercises, discussions of current topics, or collaboration on theoretical or applied problems and is an excellent opportunity to draw attention to important issues. For submission, a brief description of the groupwork proposal is to be provided (1-3 pages Springer LNCS format). Proposers of accepted groupworks are provided space to run these at the workshop and the groupwork proposal is published at the workshop webpage.

Possible topics of interest and application areas to be addressed by the workshop submissions are listed below.

IMPORTANT DATES
- September 24 (extended): Submission deadline
- October 20 (extended): Author notification
-November 4 (extended): Submission of revised papers
- November 23-24: Workshop

KEY TOPICS OF INTEREST
Building on the results from previous CONVERSATIONS workshops we outline the following topics of interest to guide workshop proposals:

1. User and communication studies. How do users perceive and communicate with chatbots? To what extent do chatbot features, dialogue style and content influence these perceptions? What is the impact of personal, social and cultural factors on chatbot uptake and use?

2. Chatbot user experience and design. How to understand, investigate and strengthen chatbot user experience? How to improve chatbot interface and interaction design? How to design for novel and improved chatbot user experiences? How to conduct user-centred evaluations?

3. Chatbots for collaboration. How to understand and design chatbots in networks of humans and intelligent agents? For example, for social networks, teamwork, or service provision.

4. Democratizing chatbots – chatbots for all. How to use chatbots to improve availability, accessibility, effectiveness, and efficiency to information and services? How can chatbots bridge digital divides. How to design inclusive chatbots?

5. Ethics and privacy in chatbots. Ethical and privacy implications of chatbots. Design for ethics and privacy in chatbots. Trust in chatbots. Considerations on bias. Mitigation of unethical chatbot use.

6. Chatbot frameworks, platforms and applications. Knowledge and experiences on current and future frameworks and platforms for chatbot development and delivery. For example, pertaining to data access, NLP, and context awareness. Chatbot training. Chatbots that learn through use. Generative chatbots. Multimodal chatbot interaction.

7. Leveraging large language models in chatbots. Recent progress on large open-domain language models, in particular Open AI GPT-3 but also Facebook Blender and Google Meena, opens new chatbot application areas. We particularly welcome papers addressing chatbot applications using such large language models.

APPLICATION AREAS
The set of relevant application areas for chatbots is increasing. We hope at the workshop to include work in areas such as the following:

- Chatbots in creative industries. Chatbots applied to engage consumers in creative industries services or events.
- Chatbots in government and public service. Providing information and services to citizens or supporting government service provision.
- Chatbots at the workplace. The use of chatbots in decision support tools and chatbots as interface for business intelligence applications, and chatbots to support general office work.
- Chatbots in the home. The use of chatbots as interfaces to information, services, and home applications. Applications for home assistants.
- Chatbots for customer service. Chatbots used by service providers to engage with users – for support and information purposes.
- Chatbots for education. To support teaching or training, to assist with administrative tasks, or to bring students together.
- Chatbots for health and therapy. Chatbots for health advice, medical counselling, therapeutic programs, or physical training programs.
- Chatbots in media and journalism. Chatbots supporting news consumption. Chatbots used to mediate news and feature content.
- Chatbots for ecommerce and marketing. Chatbots supporting marketing for brands, or brokering and sales of goods and services.

WORKSHOP ORGANIZERS
The workshop organising committee are:

Asbjørn Følstad, SINTEF, Norway
Theo Araujo, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Symeon Papadopoulos, Centre for Research and Technology Hellas, Greece
Effie L.-C. Law, University of Leicester, UK
Ewa Luger, University of Edinburgh, UK
Morten Goodwin, CAIR – Center for AI Research, University of Agder
Petter Bae Brandtzaeg, University of Oslo & SINTEF, Norway