Last week saw us say goodbye to Casey, who after a short stint as a postdoctoral researcher here has now moved back closer to home, on to a tenure-track position at Boise State, Idaho, USA. Congratulations!

Casey was the first to join the Bielefeld incarnation of the Dialogue Systems Group, so with him and Spyros Kousidis (the second member) now having moved on, it does feel like the start up phase has now concluded. Casey’s had quite the run here, with almost 20 peer-reviewed publications (including 3 full *acl papers). We’re excited to see what he’ll do next!

(From left to right: Casey, Iwan, Ting, David, Sina, Julian, Soledad; Birte & Simon couldn’t make it on that day.)

We’re going to the 10th edition of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC) in Portorož (Slovenia) this month presenting the following two papers:

Sina Zarrieß, Julian Hough, Casey Kennington, Ramesh Manuvinakurike, David DeVault, Raquel Fernández, and David Schlangen. PentoRef: A Corpus of Spoken References in Task-oriented Dialogues (PUB https://pub.uni-bielefeld.de/publication/2903076)

Julian Hough, Ye Tian, Laura de Ruiter, Simon Betz, David Schlangen and Jonathan Ginzburg. DUEL: A Multi-lingual Multimodal Dialogue Corpus for Disfluency, Exclamations and Laughter (PUB: https://pub.uni-bielefeld.de/publication/2903080)

It should be a lot of fun to interact with the linguistic resources community and share the cool stuff we’ve built up over the last few years!

Feel free to ask us (see the corresponding authors’ email addresses at the top of the papers) if you’re interested or need help getting the data.