Journal of Dialogue Systems

The first journal on dialogue systems.
Founded 2006 by Gregory Aist.

Current status: Open for submissions. See below for Submission Guidelines.

Aim

To be the premiere international journal for dialogue systems.

Editorial Board

Gregory Aist, Arizona State University, Founder and Editor-in-Chief
Jens Allwood, University of Göteborg
Sandra Carberry, University of Delaware
Justine Cassell, Northwestern University
Jennifer Chu-Carroll, IBM
Ron Cole, University of Colorado
Barbara Di Eugenio, University of Illinois at Chicago
Laila Dybkjaer, University of Southern Denmark
Dilek Hakkani-Tür, University of California at Berkeley
Kristiina Jokinen, University of Helsinki
Arne Jonsson, Linköping University
Staffan Larsson, Göteborg University
Stasha Lauria, Brunel University
Oliver Lemon, University of Edinburgh
Michael McTear, University of Ulster
Johanna Moore, University of Edinburgh
Clifford Nass, Stanford University
David Novick, University of Texas at El Paso
Tim Paek, Microsoft Research
Patti Price, PPRICE.COM
Carolyn Penstein Rosé, Carnegie Mellon University
Roni Rosenfeld, Carnegie Mellon University
Alex Rudnicky, Carnegie Mellon University
Stefanie Seneff, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Ronnie W. Smith, East Carolina University
Michael Strube, EML
Marc Swerts, Tilburg University
Gökhan Tür, SRI
Yorick Wilks, University of Sheffield

Access, Copyright, and Archiving

The Journal of Dialogue Systems is an archival journal.

We anticipate that for individual articles access will be generally be online, without charge, following the Open Access model, and that articles will be available at our website (jods.org) as well as through well-established archiving mechanisms such as the Computing Research Repository (acm.org/corr).

We anticipate the use of a Creative Commons licensing arrangement to cover the publication of articles. (See Science Commons at sciencecommons.org for details.)

We are currently exploring options to have a printed version available for libraries and individuals. Due to the costs of printing, the printed version will almost certainly require some sort of subscription or fee.

Description of the Field

A dialogue system is a computational device or agent that (a) engages in interaction with other human and/or computer participant(s); (b) uses human language in some form such as speech, text, or sign; and (c) typically engages in such interaction across multiple turns or sentences. The field of dialogue systems draws on disciplines such as linguistics, computer science, and psychology to study the research, development, deployment, and evaluation of such systems.

Rationale

The Journal of Dialogue Systems aims to provide a home for the latest research in the field. The scope of the journal includes text-based interaction, spoken dialogue systems, and multimodal dialogue. Topics covered include all levels of language understanding and production within a dialogue system context, such as acoustics, phonetics and phonemics, lexical semantics, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. Also welcome are submissions related to the engineering of dialogue systems, including rapid prototyping techniques, the software life cycle, evaluation techniques, and business/organizational models for dialogue system deployment and use.

Submission Guidelines

The Journal of Dialogue Systems welcomes submissions of the following kinds:

Research articles describing the results of original scientific research of the highest caliber. We expect the typical article to be between 4000 and 7000 words in length.
Review articles providing an authoritative summary of contemporary findings in an area of interest. Review articles should be approximately 2500 words in length.

All submissions must be original work and must not have appeared in a journal prior to submission. If a paper is under simultaneous consideration for another journal, or is an extended version of a conference publication, that must be clearly indicated on the cover page. For questions about whether a manuscript might be appropriate for submission, contact one of the editors.

Manuscripts should be submitted electronically, in Word, PDF, or HTML format. Graphics may be included in the file in order to show placement, but must also be sent as separate files in order to facilitate final publication. Preferred formats are PNG for diagrams and JPEG for photographs. The first page of the manuscript should contain the following information:

The submission date
The title of the manuscript
The complete list of author(s) including full name(s), title(s), and affiliations
Full contact details for all authors, including postal address, email address, and telephone number.

The remainder of the manuscript should not contain the author(s)' names, to facilitate anonymous review. Publication will be online in HTML format.

Send submissions by email to the Editor-in-Chief, Gregory S. Aist, with the subject line: "Journal of Dialogue Systems Submission: AuthorsLastNames Month Year". For example: "Journal of Dialogue Systems Submission: HarrisJamesTuring May 2006".

Review Process

All submissions will be anonymously peer-reviewed by at least two reviewers. Manuscripts will be marked into one of the following categories: accept, accept with revisions, revise and resubmit, or reject. For papers that are marked "accept", no revisions are needed prior to publication, and publication will proceed expiditiously. For papers that are marked "accept with revisions", the authors' revisions need only be confirmed by the responsible editor(s). For papers that are marked "revise and resubmit", the revised paper will be re-reviewed by at least one reviewer (typically the reviewer with the most salient requests for revision) and re-marked.

The editor responsible for the submission category will make the ultimate decision as to the status of a paper, taking into account (and typically yielding to) the reviewers' judgement. If the reviewers are in disagreement, the responsible editor will break the tie. In unusual circumstances, an appeal is possible to the editor-in-chief. We will aim to make an initial judgement within three months of submission.

The review form is available online.

Relation to Other Journals

Research and development of dialogue systems has deep roots in computer science, linguistics, and psychology, among other disciplines. Challenges arising in the context of dialogue systems have yielded findings and methods of wide applicability, such as the Wizard-of-Oz technique for interactive system development.

As a field, dialogue systems had matured by early 2006 to the point where there were a number of dedicated, recurring meetings: the International Symposium on Spoken Dialogue; the SemDial workshops on the semantics and pragmatics of dialogue; the meetings of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGdial); and the Young Researchers Roundtable on Spoken Dialog Systems.

There were a wide variety of journals in the fields of computational linguistics, natural language engineering, artificial intelligence, and human-computer interaction. Many of them, from time to time, published occasional articles or special issues on various topics in dialogue systems. None of them, however, focused on dialogue systems. See for example Which journals publish papers on spoken dialog systems?" and the Wikipedia article on "Dialog system" as of May 31, 2006 . (The current version of the Wikipedia article is also available.)

The time was right, therefore, for a new journal dedicated especially to the field of dialogue systems, and covering all aspects of dialogue system research, development, deployment, and evaluation.