This book presents the outcomes of the 9th International Workshop on Spoken Dialogue Systems (IWSDS), "Towards creating more human-like conversational agent technologies". It compiles and provides a synopsis of current global research to push forward the state of the art in dialogue technologies, including advances in the context of the classical problems of language understanding, dialogue management and language generation, as well as cognitive topics related to the human nature of conversational phenomena, such as humor, empathy and social context understanding and awareness.

Prof. Luis Fernando D'Haro is an Associate Professor at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (ETSIT, UPM) in Spain and a member of the Speech Technology Group. His current research mainly focuses on spoken dialogue and natural language processing systems, as well as on different applications of spoken language technologies (especially language and speaker identification), and he has written has more than 15 international publications on dialog systems. He co-led the International Dialog State Tracking Challenges (DSTC) in 2015 and 2016 and is a co-organizer of the DSTC7 challenge, with over 220 registered participants. Since 2015, Prof. D'Haro has co-organized the Wo-Chat series of workshops, which have the common goal of advancing chatbot systems and their automatic evaluation. He was also one of the local organizers of Interspeech in 2014 and the International Workshop on Spoken Dialog Systems in 2018. Dr. Rafael E. Banchs is a Senior Data Scientist at Intapp Inc. and an Adjunct Associate Professor at the Nanyang Technological University. His research focuses on natural language processing and related applications, such as dialogue systems, information retrieval, machine translation and text mining. He has also been involved in organizing various international workshops and conferences, including CAW2 at WWW 2009, ESIRMT at EACL 2012, R50 at ACL 2012, HyTra-1 at EACL 2012, HyTra-2 at ACL 2013 and AIRS 2013, HyTra-3 at EACL 2014, HyTra-4 at ACL 2015, and NEWS at ACL 2015, 2017 and 2018. Prof. Haizhou Li received his Ph.D degree from South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, China in 1990. He is a Professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National University of Singapore. His research interests include speech information processing and natural language processing.He has served as the Editor-in-Chief of IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing (2015-2018). He was the President of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA, 2015-2017), and of Asia Pacific Signal and Information Processing Association (APSIPA, 2015-2016). He is a Fellow of the IEEE and the ISCA.