SIGGEN: ACL Reports

Listed below are annual reports of the SIGGEN board to the Association for Computational Linguistics.

More ACL reports can be found in the ACL Admin Wiki and in the ACL Report Archive.

SIGGEN report 2009 (submitted 2 July 2009)

ACL SIGGEN report 2008-2009

SIGGEN continues to be a valued shared resource for an active and developing community of researchers in natural language generation. Over the past year we have achieved full compliance with ACL SIG requirements, held elections for the board, updated our online presence, given endorsement to three related workshops (with three more in the pipeline), and agreed a host for the next INLG conference, in Ireland in 2010.

SIGGEN is now fully compliant with ACL SIG requirements, including (slightly reluctantly) the assignment of officer roles (chair, secretary, treasurer, webmaster) to various board members. The new arrangements were fully confirmed in an election to the board at the end of 2008 - the next election is due at the end of 2010. We would like to thank the outgoing board members, Charles Callaway, David McDonald, Jette Viethen for their hard work on behalf of the generation community, and welcome our new members, Cecile Paris, Christian Pietsch and Sebastian Varges who join Roger Evans and Mike White on the SIGGEN board.

SIGGEN organises the biennial INLG conferences, and this year was a rest year after the very successful INLG 2008 at Salt Fork, Ohio, USA. Following an open bidding process in early 2009, we were delighted to award organisation of INLG 2010 to Ielka van der Sluis (Trinity College, Dublin), John Kelleher and Brian McNamee (Dublin Institute of Technology). INLG 2010 will be held in Trim, County Meath, Ireland, 7-9 July 2010. In addition, SIGGEN offers (non-financial) endorsement to workshops and activities related to generation, and this year we were pleased to support the Third Workshop on Constraints in Discourse (Potsdam, August 2008), a Workshop on the Question Generation Task and Evaluation Challenge (Arlington, September 2008) and the 12th European Workshop on Natural Language Generation (ENLG'09) (Athens, April 2009). Support for three further workshops in July and August 2009 (UCNLG+Sum, GIVE-2 and PRE-Cogsci 2009)is also already agreed, so we look forward to a busy year for the NLG community.

In January 2009, Christian Pietsch took over the role of SIGGEN webmaster, and gave our online presence a much needed review. As well as a general tidy-up of the main pages, Christian undertook to transfer the SIGGEN wiki site, previously hosted at Edinburgh by David Reitter, into the main ACL wiki, and to re-establish clear email addresses for contacting the SIGGEN board through the main ACL mail server (siggen-board (at) aclweb (dot) org etc.). We continue to explore effective ways to support communication and access to resources for the generation community.

SIGGEN's financial position is healthy. We last reported our account balance (as a subaccount of the ACL account) in 2007 as $928 (all figures in US dollars). We have since confirmed that INLG 2006 did not alter this balance (as it ran as an ACL workshop, hence the risk and any surpus were assumed by the main conference), and can now report that INLG 2008 made a surplus of $2943, so that our current balance stands at $3871. Such a reserve is useful to underwrite risk in free-standing events, and to allow for the possibility of subsidising attendance to the INLG conference.

Roger Evans, Cecile Paris, Christian Pietsch, Sebastian Varges, Mike White

SIGGEN board 2 July 2009

SIGGEN report 2008 (with minor corrections made by Roger Evans in July 2009)

The activities of the ACL Special Interest Group on Generation are laid out on our web site, http://www.siggen.org. We organize international workshops every other year. This is an 'on' year and we just finished our workshop at Salt Fork, Ohio (linguistics.osu.edu/inlg2008/). Over 50 people attended, with many new faces. We colocated with the 2008 referring expression generation challenge: (http://www.nltg.brighton.ac.uk/research/reg08).

We lend our name in endorsing natural language generation (NLG) related events when we are asked and the topic of the event seems appropriate to the NGL community. This past year we sponsored the second workshop on Multimodal Output Generation, MOG 2008, in Aberdeen, Scotland in April; and Using Corpora for NLG: Language Generation and Machine Translation.

This year we had a referendum to choose among several alternative for how to bring our constitution in line with the ACL guidelines. We had about a 20% response rate. The now compliant revised document is on our web page.

We have been accumulating and posting the papers of old workshops of any sort that involve NLG on http://www.siggenarchive.org.uk/.

SIGGEN report 2007

ACL SIGGEN report 2006-2007

SIGGEN is in good health. SIGGEN members have organised a range of meetings, with more in the pipeline - the SIGGEN board would particularly like to thank all the organisers of these events for their hard work on behalf of the community.

Events this year:

- INLG'06 (Sydney, August 2006 - part of ACL'06)

- Workshop on Multimodal Output Generation (Aberdeen, January 07)

- Workshop on Shared Tasks and Comparative Evaluation in NLG (Arlington, April 07) - ENLG'07 (Schloss Dagstuhl, June 2007 - prior to ACL'07)

Future events:

- Workshop on Using Corpora for NLG: Language Generation and Machine Translation (Copenhagen, September 07 - part of MT Summit)

- INLG'08 (Salt Fork, Ohio, June 2008)

There has been a lot of discussion and engagement in the SIGGEN community over the last year, in particular associated with proposals to set up 'shared task' evaluations which have become a feature in many other areas of NLP. This has resulted in the establishment of the first Shared Task and Evaluation Campaign for NLG, organised by Anja Belz (Brighton), Ehud Reiter and Albert Gatt (Aberdeen) and Jette Viethen (Macquarie), taking place from May-September 2007.

Electronic communication has been quite modest. The SIGGEN website has been well maintained, but the mailing list has seen fairly low volumes of traffic, and the wiki has also not quite taken off yet, although it does have quite a lot of useful content. The SIGGEN board aim to improve the SIG's electronic profile over coming months, reviewing the role and delivery of the wiki, and exploring the establishment of a repository for NLG papers not submittable to the main ACL repository.

Elections for three committee posts were held in 2006, resulting in the appointment of Michael White, Roger Evans and Jette Viethen (student representative). The board thanks the outgoing members (Tilman Becker, Irene Langkilde-Geary and David Reiter) for their work on behalf of SIGGEN. The board has responded to the ACL request to improve compliance with SIG guidelines, and are now fully compliant apart from board and election structure - this requires consultation with the membership and possible constitutional changes and will be pursued over coming months. A call for proposals to host INLG'08 was issued, resulting in a successful bid from Michael White and Crystal Nakatsu (Ohio State) and David McDonald (BBN) to host in Ohio. Budgets and a contract with the venue have been negotiated. The SIGGEN shadow account shows a balance of $928, but figures for INLG'06 have not yet been taken into account.

Charles Callaway, Roger Evans, David McDonald, Jette Viethen, Michael White

SIGGEN board

SIGGEN report 2006

SIGGEN report 2005-2006

Conferences and Workshops:

- ENLG 2005, Aberdeen

- INLG 2006, Sydney

- Workshop on Using Corpora for NLG

- planned:

- WORKSHOP ON MULTIMODAL OUTPUT GENERATION to be held on January 25 and 26, 2007 at Aberdeen University

- ENLG 2007 (with ACL 2007, Prag early June)

Other activities:

- finalized INLG 2004 finances w/ profit

- newsletter, mailing list

- website with Wiki hosted at DFKI and UEDIN: www.siggen.org

upcoming elections

1) Tilman B. has finished his two years

2) Irene G. has finished the last year of Lyn Walker's term

3) David R. has finished as students get only a one-year term

4) David M. and Charles have one year left

SIGGEN report 2005

SIGGEN annual report for the period July 2004 to June 2005

SIGGEN, the special interest group in Natural Language Generation has started a number of activities this year. Charles Callaway, David McDonald and Irene Geary were elected as new regular members, David Reitter was elected as the student member and Tilman Becker is staying on the board for another year.

The SIGGEN website is now located at http://www.siggen.org and it is hosted at DFKI. The content has been completely revised, including the who-is-who. At the same time, the mailing-list which doubles as the membership register has been validated and currently has 209 entries. Also, a regular newsletter has been re-instated, the first issue May/June 2005 has just been published.

SIGGEN is currently preparing for its main event, the bi-annual conference INLG. A call for bids for INLG 2006 has been posted. In the last year, four events have been officially sponsored by SIGGEN:

-EWNLG 2005, the 10th European Workshop on Natural Language Generation 8-10 August 2005, in Aberdeen, Scotland (following IJCAI-2005 in Edinburgh) http://www.ling.helsinki.fi/~gwilcock/ENLG-05/

- 5th Workshop on Computational Models of Natural Argument 30th July 2005, Edinburgh, Scotland (as part of IJCAI-2005) http://www.csc.liv.ac.uk/~floriana/CMNA5/

- Using Corpora for Natural Language Generation July 14, in Birmingham, England (preceding Corpus Linguistics 2005) http://www.itri.brighton.ac.uk/ucnlg/

- Symposium on Dialogue Modelling and Generation at the Annual meeting of the Society for Text & Discourse Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands July 7, 2005 http://lubitsch.lili.uni-bielefeld.de/DMG/

Tilman Becker,

June 2005

SIGGEN report 2003

SIGGEN (Owen Rambow)

Owen Rambow, rambow AT cs.columbia.edu

SIGGEN report 2003

CONFERENCES AND WORKSHOPS: The major NLG event of the year was INLG-02, which SIGGEN sponsored and supported. It was held in Columbia University's Arden House, near New York City, just before ACL (which took place in Philadelphia). While submissions were as in previous years (with, as in previous years, an acceptance rate of about 50%), attendance was below expectations (about 75 paying attendants, down from the record 100 at the workshop in 1998, with the first conference in Israel in 2000 having a lower attendance, presumably due to the location). An attempt to extend the audience by having special paper tracks on both dialog and summarization were not successful, perhaps due to lack of sufficient publicity outside of the standard NLG communities, and/or lack of NLG-related work in these areas outside of the NLG community (which would submit anyway). A further factor for low attendance may have been the co-location with ACL, from which it was separated by the July 4 holiday.

It was decided that INLG04 will be organized by a group at the University of Brighton and take place near Southampton, England.

There has been a request by Susan Haller to co-sponsor a special track on user modeling and HCI approaches in natural language generation at FLAIRS.

MAILING LIST AND WEB SITE: The web site needs to be updated.Helmut Horacek and Tilman Becker have jointly taken over this task.

ELECTION: A contested election was held for new board members. Tilman Becker (Saarbrücken) and Marilyn Walker (Sheffield) replaced Maria Milosavljevic and Ehud Reiter as permanent board members, and Stephen Wan (Sydney) replaced NoŽmie Elhadad as student member.

SIGGEN report 2002

Report on SIGGEN 01-02

CONFERENCES AND WORKSHOPS: The major NLG event of the year is INLG-02, which SIGGEN is sponsoring and supporting. It will be held in Columbia University's Arden House, near New York City, just before ACL. For more information see the conference web site at http://inlg02.cs.columbia.edu/.

SIGGEN did not this year receive any requests to offer "support in name" for NLG workshops. This is probably because there are no specific NLG events this year other than INLG. This would be worrying if it marks the start of a trend, but we hope it is just a one-off blip, and that next year we will again see NLG workshops either stand-alone or as part of other conferences.

MAILING LIST AND WEB SITE: One technical change, which is that the mailing list was moved to a new server. But in general both seem to bw working well, and providing useful information to the community.

ELECTION: An election was held for new board members. Owen Rambow and Helmut Horacek replaced Daniel Marcu and Keith vander Linden as permanent board members, and Noemie Elhadad replaced Irene Langkilde as student member.

CONSTITUTIONAL ISSUES: Comments were solicited from the community on a formal constitution, and a draft constitution was posted on the SIGGEN web page. We expect to discuss the constitution at INLG-02, and then hold a formal acceptance vote.

SIGGEN report 2001

SIGGEN Report

Ehud Reiter

CONFERENCES AND WORKSHOPS: SIGGEN solicited bids for INLG-02. One bid was received, from Kathy McKeown to hold INLG in Arden House in New York State. The committee of previous INLG chairs accepted this bid, after passing on some comments and suggestions to Kathy. SIGGEN also offered "support in name" to the 2001 European NLG workshop (which is associated with ACL'01) and to the International workshop on Computational Models of Natural Language Argument (associated with ICCS'01). We also decided we would like to keep statistical data (papers, attendees, finances) on INLG conferences, and managed to retrospectively gather such data for several past INLGs.

MAILING LIST: We had some perhaps inappropriate postings on the SIGGEN mailing list (and some people shortly afterwards removed themselves from the list), so we decided to make it moderated. The moderators are two board members (Maria Milosavljevic and Ehud Reiter). After moderation, the SIGGEN mailing list is low-frequency (less than 10 messages per month) but high quality, and very few people have unsubscribed from the list subsequently.

WEB SITE: Our Web site continues to be an up-to-date list of conferences, announcements, jobs, books, and other information useful to the NLG community.

ELECTION: As agreed in INLG-00, we are holding an election for two (of the four) non-student board members, plus the student member; two of the existing non-student members will stay on. A call for candidates was sent out on 1 May 2001, and the election itself will happen over the summer.

CONSTITUTIONAL ISSUES: We discussed the new ACL Guidelines for SIG's, but felt that any changes to SIGGEN's structure should be discussed and approved at an INLG business meeting, it would be inappropriate for the current board to act on its own.

SIGGEN report 1999

IGGEN (Ehud Reiter, Daniel Marcu)

Report on SIGGEN 98-99

An election for SIGGEN board was held in October 1998, via email. There were 6 candidates for regular board member, of which 4 were elected, and 2 candidates for student board member, of which one was elected. The new board members are Irene Langkilde (ISI, USA; student member), Daniel Marcu (ISI, USA), Maria Milosavljevic (Dynamic Multimedia Pty Ltd, Australia), Ehud Reiter (Univ of Aberdeen, UK), and Keith Vander Linden (Calvin College, USA). None of the new members had previously served on the SIGGEN board.

Activities after the election include

• a new and expanded Web site (http://www.dynamicmultimedia.com.au/siggen)

• a new-look email newsletter (back issues available on the Web page)

• an open discussion (again via the Web page) on the future of the International Natural Language Generation Workshop (INLGW) and other NLG events.

Future plans include creating an archive of NLG material, both technical (eg, an NLG bibliography) and organisational (eg, information on the organisation of NLG workshops).

SIGGEN report 1994

SIGGEN

David McDonald

mcdonald AT cs.brandeis.edu

As in the past, SIGGEN's activities this past year have revolved around its moderated bboard, the workshops of the membership, and initiatives being worked on by its five person organizing committee.

Our bulletin board resides at "siggen (at) benus (dot) bgl (dot) ac (dot) il". Queries, announcements, and other messages to the group can be sent there and will be collected and forwarded to the whole group.

Two workshops on language generation are being held this year. SIGGEN acts just as a mediator in coordinating workshops, though this year many on the organizing committee were also principals in these workshops' organizing committees. The Seventh International Workshop on Natural Language Generation will be / was held this June in Kennebunkport Maine. [Details to go into Finite String report] An invited workshop on generation will be held in Dagstuhl, Germany in July.

We have started three new projects via SIGGEN and anticipate beginning a fourth. We are trying to develop a comprehensive description of the field of natural language generation in terms of a set of well defined and balanced subject keywords with pointers back to the existing literature. An initial draft of this list should be available in the early fall for community discussion. The aim is to be inclusive and non-presumptive, so we are seeking creative ways to present the keyword and cross-index set that will make this possible.

We are trying to make the unpublished papers of past generation workshops available in some form over the net. The technical means for accommodating this is still being worked out since our authors use a wide variety of editors and formats and the search for a workable common denominator that is not too low is still ongoing.

We are also compiling a description of the steps that go into organizing our workshops and compiling a set of materials that should be reusable so that the next organizers will not have to start essentially from scratch as has been the case in the past.

Finally, with the evaluation of natural language systems having become so important and with the long-standing difficulty of even defining what it would mean to compare two generators (different assumptions about the boundaries of the process, different representations of the source and different kinds and amounts of information in it, differences in the task and setting, etc.), we anticipate that we will also initiate a community discussion of evaluation via our query board, and solicit careful descriptions of common technical problems, linguistic or semantic phenomena that are problematic for generators (or presumed to be simple), etc. The result would be a shared and evolving workbook can be accumulated for researchers to consult.

SIGGEN report 1993

SIGGEN (NATURAL LANGUAGE GENERATION)

Karen Kukich

18 June 1993

MEMBERSHIP

SIGGEN membership, which currently stands at 170, is open to any member of the ACL whose dues are paid for the current year. Anyone wishing to become a SIGGEN member may contact David McDonald at siggen AT cs.brandeis.edu or at the postal address below. The SIGGEN mailing/membership list is available to SIGGEN members.

SIGGEN BOARD OF DIRECTORS

The SIGGEN Board of Directors is in transition. Volunteer nominations were solicited and an election was held in May and June of 93 to replace two members of the SIGGEN committee with one new professional member and one new student member. Karen Kukich and Marie Meteer volunteered to vacate their positions to create new openings. The results of the nominations and voting were as follows:

PROFESSIONAL VOLUNTEERS:

---

Michael Elhadad	23
Cecile Paris	21
Koenraad Desmedt	17

GRAD STUDENT VOLUNTEERS:

---

Manfred Stede	25
Nicolas Nicolov	24
Massimo Fasciano	9

Thus, the new SIGGEN Board of Directors will be comprised of the following:

David McDonald	Johanna Moore
Content Technologies	University of Pittsburgh
14 Brantwood Road	520 LRDC
Arlington, MA 02174-8004 USA	Pittsburgh, PA 15260 USA
Mcdonald AT cs.brandeis.edu	jmoore AT cs.pitt.edu
Robert Dale	Michael Elhadad
University of Edinburgh	Dept of Mathematics and Computer Science
Centre for Cognitive Science	Ben Gurion University of the Negev
2 Buccleuch Place	Beer Sheva 84105
Edinburgh EH8 9LW Scotland	Israel
R.Dale AT edinburgh.ac.uk	elhadad AT bengus.BGU.AC.IL
Manfred Stede
Department of Computer Science
University of Toronto
Toronto M5S 1A4, Canada
mstede AT cs.toronto.edu

Board members are meeting at the ACL-93 meeting to plan for the transistion.

SIGGEN QUERY BOARD

The SIGGEN QueryBoard address will change. During 1993 the QueryBoard served as a forum for a lengthy discussion of SIGGEN's raison d'etre and its role in various activities. SIGGEN has sponsored various workshops and mtgs in the past, but SIGGEN as not itself organized such meetings. Some SIGGEN members feel strongly that SIGGEN itself should NOT organize or govern such mtgs, tho it might help coordinate the scheduling of such mtgs with other ACL functions. Other SIGGEN members have suggested that some SIGGEN committee, perhaps analogous to the AAAI secretariate, be set up, by election, to oversee the organization of such mtgs. These issues will be addressed by the new SIGGEN board members.

SIGGEN SPONSORED WORKSHOPS

SIGGEN co-sponsored the following workshops during the past year:

1) The Nato Advanced Research Workshop on Burning Issues in Discourse, Maratea, Italy, 13th - 15th April, 1993. A notice was posted to the SIGGEN mailing list that proceedings are available for a fee of 8 US dollars or 5 pounds sterling from:

Donia Scott,

Information Technology Research Institute,

University of Brighton,

Brighton Bn1 4AT,

England

2) The Fourth European Workshop on Natural Language Generation, Pisa - Italy - April 28-30, 1993. An informal report on this workshop written by Robin Fawcett and Koenraad de Smedt was posted to the SIGGEN mailing list.

3) The ACL Workshop on Intentionality & Discourse Structure, Columbus, Ohio, June 21, 1993. Proceedings will be available from Owen Rambow, rambow AT unagi.cis.upenn.edu.

SEVENTH INTERNATIONAL NLG WORKSHOP

The International NLG Workshop has been the primary mtg for NLG researchers. The SIGGEN community has been discussing various issues concerning how this and related mtgs might be organized in the future. A committee consisting of McDonald, de Smedt, Fawcett, Hovy, Meteer, and Scott will be making a recommendation soon.

NLG BIBLIOGRAHY

A new revised version (23rd February 1993) of Robert Dale's NLG bibliography, in compressed PostScript form, is available by anonymous ftp from scott.cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Internet 129.215.144.3). This version includes new material that has appeared within the last year, plus a significant number of additions and corrections provided by members of the NLG community.

13. SIGPHON (COMPUTATIONAL PHONOLOGY)

Steven Bird

10 June 93

The purpose of the ACL Special Interest Group in Computational Phonology is to (i) place computational phonology firmly on the research agenda in computational linguistics, (ii) develop links between researchers in computational phonology, and (iii) facilitate the dissemination of research results and software.

Current membership stands at 110 people and members generally have an active interest in the field rather than just being onlookers. Members receive a bimonthly newsletter and have access to an FTP directory which houses the membership directory, newsletter back-issues, research papers and software. This year, the SIG proposed and was granted a special issue of _Computational Linguistics_, and 22 papers are currently under review. The SIG has recently been advertised in _Phonology_ and in _Computer Speech and Language_, as we try to build on our membership and promote dialogue between the speech and language communities.

For further information, contact:

Steven Bird.

University of Edinburgh, Centre for Cognitive Science

2 Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh EH8 9LW, Scotland, U.K.

Telephone: (031) 650-4421/4432. Fax: (031) 650-4587.