2015Q3 Reports: SIGGEN

Summary

SIGGEN is the Special Interest group on Natural Language Generation, the study of systems and methods to generate text or speech from both non-linguistic and linguistic input.

Membership

Currently, SIGGEN has around 309 members.

Board

An election was held in December 2014 for three positions on the SIGGEN board. The new members are the following:

• Claire Gardent (CNRS, Loria, Nancy), Chair
• Albert Gatt (University of Malta), Secretary
• Xiao Li (University of Aberdeen), student representative

in addition to the following serving members, whose term of elected office started on January 1, 2013:

• Barbara di Eugenio (University of Illinois at Chicago), Treasurer
• Verena Rieser (Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh), Member at large

Activities

International Conference on Natural Language Generation (INLG)

The main activity of SIGGEN is the International Conference on Natural Language Generation, a biennial meeting. The 8th edition of INLG was held in Philadelphia, PA, on June 19-21, 2014. On this occasion, INLG was co-located with the annual meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL) and The Young Researchers’ Roundtable on Spoken Dialog Systems. INLG 2014 was organised by by Margaret Mitchell (MS), David McDonald (SIFT), Kathleen McCoy (UDelaware) (General Chairs) Aoife Cahill (ETS), Verena Rieser (Sponsorship Chair)

The next INLG is scheduled to take place in 2016. Currently, the SIGGEN board is taking the necessary steps to identify the local organisers and programme committee chairs for the next event.

SIGGEN-endorsed events

SIGGEN has also endorsed the following events:

• ENLG 2013: The 14th European Workshop on Natural Language Generation, held in Sofia, Bulgaria on August 8-9, 2013
• The 1st International Workshop on Data-to-Text Generation, held in Edinburgh on March 6th, 2015
• ENLG 2015: The 15th European Workshop on Natural Language Generation, to be held in Brighton, UK on 10-11 September, 2015. This event is also organised with the help of COST Action IC1307 The European Network on Vision and Language (iV&L)

Financial report

SIGGEN's financial position continues to be extremely healthy. Prior to INLG-2014, SIGGEN had USD 9317 in its sub-account. INLG'14 resulted in a surplus of $1144,20, for a total of $10,461.53. The surplus resulted because INLG'14 totalled $5k of sponsorship income from ARRIA, Microsoft, Amazon and ETS. We are confident in the continued health of SIGGEN finances, in particular since ARRIA has successfully applied for platinum sponsorship for INLG for the next 3 years. The SIGGEN board had conversations in the past on how to spend part of the money, for example by supporting student attendance at INLG. We will revisit those conversations in the near future.