Following the success of IWSDS 2009 (Irsee, Germany), IWSDS 2010 (Gotemba Kogen Resort, Japan), IWSDS 2011 (Granada, Spain), IWSDS 2012 (Paris, France), IWSDS 2014 (Napa, USA), and IWSDS 2015 (Busan, South Korea), the Seventh International Workshop on Spoken Dialogue System (IWSDS 2016) will be held in Saariselkä, Finland, on January 13-16, 2016.

The IWSDS 2016 will be the northernmost spoken dialogue workshop ever, and it allows you to enjoy the workshop as well as beautiful winter scenes and activities in Finnish Lapland. The IWSDS series provides an international forum for the presentation of research and applications, and for lively discussion among researchers as well as industrialists, with a special interest in the practical implementation of spoken dialogue systems in everyday applications. IWSDS 2016 designates Dialogues with Social Robots: Enablements, Analyses, and Evaluation as a special theme of discussion.

Within the main theme of Dialogues with Social Robots: Enablements, Analyses, and Evaluation, we invite submissions especially on the following topics:
· Robot dialogues and smooth communication
· Engagement and emotion in human-robot interactions
· Symbiosis between robots and humans
· Educational and healthcare robot applications
· Digital resources for interactive applications
· Multi-modal and machine learning methods
· Companions, personal assistants and dialogue systems
· Proactive and anticipatory interactions
· Dialogue systems and reasoning
· Big data and large scale spoken dialogue systems

The workshop will feature three special sessions, for which submissions are encouraged. The papers to the special sessions will be evaluated according to the same quality standards as the main conference papers but the authors should indicate that their paper is for the special session so that one of the reviewers can be assigned as a representative of the special session theme.

· Dialogue State Tracking Challenge (organisers: Luis F. D’Haro, Seokhwan Kim, Rafael E.Banchs, Matthew Henderson, Jason Williams)
· Evaluation of Human-Robot Dialog in Social Robotics (organisers: Laurence Devillers, Kristiina Jokinen, Joseph Mariani, Haizhu Li, Alex Waibel, Wolfgang Minker)
· Socio-cognitive Language Processing (organisers: Björn Schuller, Mike McTear)

However, submissions are not limited to these topics, and submission of papers in all areas of spoken dialogue systems is encouraged. We particularly welcome papers that can be illustrated by a demonstration, and will organize the conference in order to best accommodate these papers, whatever their category.

As usual, a selection of accepted papers will be published in a book by Springer following the conference (Springer LNEE series, SCOPUS and other important indexed, see http://www.springer.com/series/7818).

Important dates

Long and short paper submission: September 23, 2015
Notification of acceptance: October 31, 2015
Demo submission: November 2, 2015
Camera ready due: November 16, 2015
Early registration deadline: November 16, 2015
IWSDS 2016 workshop: January 13 - 16, 2016