An Analysis of the Recent Visibility of the SigDial Conference

TL;DR

This paper examines the visibility of the SigDial conference within the broader NLP community by analyzing citation patterns and topic popularity from 2015 onwards, revealing limited growth in its prominence despite rising dialogue research.

Contribution

It provides the first systematic analysis of SigDial's visibility and influence in the NLP community through citation and topic trend analysis.

Findings

SigDial's visibility has not increased despite rising dialogue research.

SigDial-related topics are less cited outside the conference.

Dialogue research has grown dramatically since 2015.

Abstract

Automated speech and text interfaces are continuing to improve, resulting in increased research in the area of dialogue systems. Moreover, conferences and workshops from various fields are focusing more on language through speech and text mediums as candidates for interaction with applications such as search interfaces and robots. In this paper, we explore how visible the SigDial conference is to outside conferences by analysing papers from top Natural Langauge Processing conferences since 2015 to determine the popularity of certain SigDial-related topics, as well as analysing what SigDial papers are being cited by others outside of SigDial. We find that despite a dramatic increase in dialogue-related research, SigDial visibility has not increased. We conclude by offering some suggestions.