Information

We invite submissions for SemDial 2026 – LuffDial, the 30th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue at Loughborough University, Loughborough UK. This conference brings together researchers working on the semantics and pragmatics of dialogue across diverse disciplines, including formal semantics, computational linguistics, artificial intelligence, philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience.

Topics

Submissions are welcome from all areas presenting formal, computational, and empirical approaches to the semantics and pragmatics of dialogue, including but not limited to:

  • Dynamics of agents’ information states in dialogue
  • Common ground and mutual belief
  • Goals, intentions, and commitments in communication
  • Turn-taking and interaction control
  • Semantic and pragmatic interpretation in dialogue
  • Dialogue and discourse structure
  • Categorization of dialogue phenomena in corpora
  • Child-adult interaction and language learning through dialogue
  • Gesture, gaze, and intonational meaning in communication
  • Multimodal dialogue
  • Interpretation and reasoning in spoken dialogue systems
  • Dialogue management, design, and evaluation
  • Modeling miscommunication, disfluency, and repair
  • Interdisciplinary perspectives, including enactive and ecological approaches to dialogue
  • Applications of innovative theoretical models to dialogue research

Submission Details

Submissions should meet the following requirements:

  • Papers should be original, unpublished, and not under review elsewhere.
  • Papers that have been or will be submitted to other meetings or publications must provide this information, using a footnote on the title page of the submissions.
  • Papers should follow the ACL formatting guidelines and use the ACL submission templates.
  • Submissions should be anonymized PDF-files.

Long papers:

  • 4-8 pages of content,
  • (optional) unlimited extra space after the conclusion for limitations and optionally ethical considerations,
  • unlimited pages of references,
  • (optional) unlimited pages for appendices (but please be selective).

Short papers (Posters):

  • Up to 2 pages of content (up to 1 additional page allowed for references). Submission to this track can be non-archival on request.
  • Accepted short papers will be presented as posters at the conference.
  • (optional) unlimited extra space after the conclusion for limitations and optionally ethical considerations,
  • (optional) unlimited pages for appendices (but please be selective).

Submission: Please submit your paper via EasyChair

Final Camera Ready Versions

Authors of accepted papers or posters should submit a final camera-ready version for publication in the SemDial proceedings by 6th August. At least one author per paper/abstract must be registered by that date. Details on how to register can be found in the registration section.

To prepare the camera-ready version authors must use the same formatting guidelines as for original submissions: please make sure you use these LaTeX style files or Microsoft Word templates. We have also slightly increased the page limit to allow authors to adequately address reviewer comments: full papers can be up to 10 pages excluding references; abstracts can be up to 3 pages excluding references. Please upload the final version via the Easychair submission site.

NB: Ethical considerations and limitations sections do not count towards the page limit.

Presentation Format and Proceedings

Accepted full papers will be featured as 20-minute oral presentations at the workshop; accepted posters will be featured during the poster session. Both types of contributions will be published in the SemDial 2026 (LuffDial) proceedings, unless we hear otherwise from the authors.

Poster format

A0, portrait format only please.

You may find it useful to print a poster locally - and collect it from our print shop rather than travelling with your poster.

Please remember: we only have space for portrait format posters.

The print shop needs a 3-day lead time for standard poster printing, so Monday 1st September will be the latest you can order your poster.

The ‘standard poster’ print request form is here: https://community.onlineshop.lboro.ac.uk/product/2025-hybrid-community-standard-poster/6569 There are also other (more expensive) options available - though they may have longer lead times: https://community.onlineshop.lboro.ac.uk/category/2024-posters/832 A standard portrait A0 poster costs £24 to print at Loughborough. If you are a student or will find it hard to pay for this extra cost, we can offer to print yours for free - but you have to send us your A0 (or smaller) poster by noon on Wednesday 26th August.

Important Dates

(see Important Dates).