Programme at a Glance
| Time | Topic |
|---|---|
| Wednesday, September 3, 2025 | |
| 08:00–09:00 | Registration |
| 09:00–09:15 | Welcome |
| 09:15–10:30 | Keynote: Arabella Sinclair |
| 10:30–10:50 | Coffee Break |
| 10:50–12:20 | Session 1: Studies – Natural Dialogue |
| 12:20–13:40 | Lunch Break: Mensa |
| 13:40–15:40 | Session 2: Grounding and Repair |
| 15:40–16:00 | Coffee Break |
| 16:00–17:30 | Poster Session 1 |
| 17:30–18:30 | Welcome Reception |
| 19:30– | Evening Suggestions: Brauhaus Joh. Albrecht or Weinmarkt |
| Thursday, September 4, 2025 | |
| 08:30–09:00 | Registration |
| 09:00–10:30 | Session 3: Language Models and Dialogue Systems |
| 10:30–11:00 | Coffee Break |
| 11:00–12:30 | Session 4: Turn-Taking |
| 12:30–14:00 | Lunch Break: Mensa |
| 13:30–14:00 | SemDial Business Meeting |
| 14:00–15:30 | Poster Session 2 |
| 15:30–16:00 | Coffee Break |
| 16:00–17:15 | Keynote: Robert D. Hawkins |
| 18:30– | Conference Dinner: NUMA |
| Friday, September 5, 2025 | |
| 08:30–09:00 | Registration |
| 09:00–11:00 | Session 5: Studies – Mediated Dialogue |
| 11:00–11:30 | Coffee Break |
| 11:30–12:45 | Keynote: David Schlangen |
| 12:45–13:00 | Closing |
Programme Booklet and Proceedings
- SemDial 2025 – Bialogue Conference Programme Booklet
- SemDial 2025 – Bialogue. Proceedings of the 29th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue
- Access to individual papers in the SemDial Anthology
Keynotes
- Arabella Sinclair: The Many Reasons for Repetition in Dialogue
- Robert D. Hawkins: Foraging for Common Ground
- David Schlangen: Meaningful Interaction with Unreal Speakers
Session 1: Studies – Natural Dialogue
- Grammatical person as a clue to interpreting French how-questions (Jan Fliessbach, Lucia M. Tovena and Damien Fleury)
- Does it take two to do an articulatory tango? Investigating the production of novel phonetic forms in varying communicative settings (Leonie Schade, Daniel Duran, Sina Zarrieß, Joana Cholin and Petra Wagner)
- ‘No no no no no no no’: Multiple repetition in dialogue (Zulipiye Yusupujiang, Paola Herreno-Castaneda, Mathilde Dargnat and Jonathan Ginzburg)
Session 2: Grounding and Repair
- Identifying repair opportunities in child-caregiver interactions (Abhishek Agrawal, Benoit Favre and Abdellah Fourtassi)
- Do young adolescents draw on common ground like adults? (Clara Grégoire, Héloïse Retournard, Stéphane Rauzy and Maud Champagne-Lavau)
- Social repair (Alafate Abulimiti, Vladislav Maraev)
- Misunderstanding the concrete, disagreeing about the abstract: A closer look at word meaning negotiation triggers (Bill Noble, Staffan Larsson and Jenny Myrendal)
Session 3: Language Models and Dialogue Systems
- Benchmarking LLMs for mimicking child-caregiver language in interaction (Jing Liu and Abdellah Fourtassi)
- Conv-BDI: An extension of the BDI framework for conversational agents (Nicholas Thomas Walker, Nicolas Wagner, Laetitia Hilgendorf and Stefan Ultes)
- Automated administration of questionnaires during casual conversation using question-guiding dialogue system (Yuki Zenimoto, Mariko Yoshida, Ryo Hori, Mayu Urata, Aiko Inoue, Takahiro Hayashi and Ryuichiro Higashinaka)
Session 4: Turn-Taking
- Why so cold and distant? Effects of inter-turn gap durations on observers’ attributions of interpersonal stance (Stefan Blohm and Mathias Barthel)
- Alexa, you are too slow! Invariant turn-transition times and conversational flow in natural human–voice agent interaction (Mathias Barthel)
- Head and hand movements during turn transitions: Data-based multimodal analysis using the Frankfurt VR gesture–speech alignment corpus (FraGA) (Andy Lücking, Felix Voll, Daniel Rott, Alexander Henlein and Alexander Mehler)
Session 5: Studies – Mediated Dialogue
- Information exchange vs. opinion discussion as distinct communicative contexts in online conversations: A corpus-based study of speech acts and rhetorical relations dynamics in dialogue (Gonzalo Freijedo Aduna and Alda Mari)
- Shaping virtual interactions: F-formations in social VR (Karl Clarke and Patrick Healey)
- Seeking agreement in remote psychiatric consultations: A conversation analytic perspective (Naphat Jittavisutthikul, Patrick Healey, Sarah Bourdin and Philip McNamee)
- Constructing a multi-party conversational corpus focusing on interlocutor relationships (Taro Tsuda, Sanae Yamashita, Koji Inoue, Tatsuya Kawahara and Ryuichiro Higashinaka)
Poster Session 1 (Wednesday 16:00)
- Pragmatic reasoning for irony detection with large language models in English and Norwegian (Margareta Berg, Ildikó Pilán, Ingrid Lossius Falkum and Pierre Lison)
- “It’s simply a different way of communicating” – Attitudes on nonverbal communication of autistic adults in the Netherlands (Anna Palmann, James P. Trujillo, Linda Drijvers and Floris Roelofsen)
- Are you laughing at me? Patterns of laughter while playing a voice activated game in pairs compared to single-player (Talha Bedir, Bora Kara, Christine Howes)
- Toward emotional description via meta-dialogue: A preliminary framework for data collection (Kei Shimonishi, Koji Inoue, Yasuyuki Usuda and Rui Sakaida)
- Child-directed speech is fine-tuned to children’s developmental needs [non-archival] (Bastian Bunzeck and Holger Diessel)
- Surprised to kill: Quantifying LLM uncertainty in morally-charged triadic dialogues (Vanessa Vanzan, Nikolai Ilinykh, Erik Lagerstedt, Amy Han Qiu, Vladislav Maraev and Christine Howes)
- Communication at an angle (Mattias Appelgren, Ellen Breitholtz, Robin Cooper and Simon Dobnik)
- How task complexity and voice type shape prosodic and physiologic cues of engagement in human-machine dialogue (Océane Granier, Roxane Bertrand, Kévin Gravouil and Laurent Prévot)
- The FLEX benchmark: Evaluating pragmatic competence in LLMs via false presuppositions (Judith Sieker, Clara Lachenmaier and Sina Zarrieß)
- One -hii to rule them all: Functions and intonation of particle -hii in Hindi movie dialogues (Shravani Patil and Farhat Jabeen)
- Intonation and prosodic phrasing of particle ‘-hii’ in Hindi/Urdu dialogues (Farhat Jabeen and Shravani Patil)
- Integrating LLMs into the DIARC cognitive architecture to resolve past temporal references (Valerio Farriciello and Frank Förster)
Poster Session 2 (Thursday 14:00)
- Across the board: Human-human game learning dialogues (Mattias Appelgren, Erik Lagerstedt, Christine Howes and Asad B. Sayeed)
- The dual nature as a local context to explore verbal behaviour in game explanations (Josephine B. Fisher and Lutz Terfloth)
- Towards a discourse-structure based response classification for interviews (René Nicolas and Arndt Riester)
- Contextual interpretation in human-robot dialogue (Svetlana Stoyanchev, Youmna Farag, Simon Keizer, Mohan Li and Rama Doddipatla)
- Mapping the landscape of dialogue research: A meta-analysis of ACL Anthology 2024 (Amandine Decker, Maxime Amblard and Ellen Breitholtz)
- Evaluating prosodic variation in English and Icelandic synthesized speech (Caitlin Laura Richter, Naizeth Núñez Macías, Stefán Ólafsson, Jon Gudnason and Hannes Högni Vilhjálmsson)
- Conceptual pact models of reference in building games with dialogue: Scaling up from Pentomino Puzzles to the challenge of Minecraft (Julian Hough, Chris Madge, Matthew Purver and Massimo Poesio)
- MLLMs construction company – Investigating multimodal LLMs’ communicative skills in a collaborative building task [non-archival] (Marika Sarzotti, Giovanni Duca, Chris Madge, Raffaella Bernardi and Massimo Poesio)
- Learning to refer: How scene complexity affects emergent communication in neural agents (Dominik Künkele and Simon Dobnik)