To get back (?) into the habit of posting here, a quick couple of news items:

• Soledad Lopez received the best paper award at SIGdial for her paper “Beyond On-Hold Messages: Conversational Time-Buying in Task-Oriented Dialogue”. (Lopez Gambino MS, Zarrieß S, Schlangen D. Beyond On-Hold Messages: Conversational Time-Buying in Task-Oriented Dialogue. In: Proceedings of SIGdial 2017. 2017. [pdf]
• Sina Zarrieß will present a demo at INLG (“Refer-iTTS: A System for Referring in Spoken Installments to Objects in Real-World Images”, [pdf]), and our paper “Deriving continous grounded meaning representations from referentially structured multimodal contexts” at EMNLP [pdf].
• Ting Han had two papers accepted at IJCNLP (upcoming in November): “Natural Language Informs the Interpretation of Iconic Gestures: a Computational Approach”, and “Draw and Tell: Multimodal Descriptions Outperform Verbal- or Sketch-Only Descriptions in an Image Retrieval Task”.
• .. and finally, Julian Hough has just returned from presenting “Towards Deep End-of-Turn Prediction for Situated Spoken Dialogue Systems” (together with Angelika Maier, on whose MA thesis this is based; [pdf]) at Interspeech and “Grounding Imperatives to Actions is Not Enough: A Challenge for Grounded NLU for Robots from Human-Human Data” at the “Grounding Language Understanding” workshop there ([pdf]).