2019Q3 Reports: SIGGEN

ACL Special Interest Group on Natural Language Generation (SIGGEN): 2019 Report

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 419 members.

Board

An election was held in December 2018 for three positions on the SIGGEN board. The members elected in 2018, whose roles were assigned by consensus by the SIGGEN board, are the following:

Ehud Reiter (Aberdeen University, UK), Chair
Jose M. Alonso (University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain), Secretary
Amanda Curry (Heriot-Watt University, UK), student representative

In addition, there are the following serving members, whose term of elected office started on January 1, 2017:

Dimitra Gkatzia (Edinburgh Napier University, UK), Member
Amanda Stent (Bloomberg, USA), Treasurer

The next SIGGEN board election is due to take place in December 2020.

Activities

Since the period covered in the last report for 2018, SIGGEN has been responsible for the following events.

INLG 2018

The 11th edition of INLG was held in Tilburg, The Netherlands, on November 5-8, 2018 (https://inlg2018.uvt.nl/). INLG 2018 was organised by the Tilburg University Language Production (TULP) research group, part of the Department of Communication and Cognition (DCC) of the Tilburg School of Humanities and Digital Sciences (TSHD). It was chaired by Emiel Krahmer (TULP), Martijn Goudbeek (TULP), and Albert Gatt (Malta University).

Following the INLG 2017 template, INLG 2018 included, in addition to the main conference, several workshops, a tutorial, a hackathon as well as a Generation Challenge session featuring both two running challenges and proposals for future shared tasks.

Generation Challenges
Workshop on Computational Creativity in Natural Language Generation
Workshop on Intelligent Interactive Systems and Language Generation
Workshop on Natural Language Generation for Human–Robot Interaction
Workshop on Automatic Text Adaptation
Tutorial: Yoav Goldberg (Bar Ilan University, Israel): Neural NLG
SIGGEN Hackathon

INLG 2019

The next INLG is scheduled to take place in Tokyo, Japan, from 29 October to 1 November 2019 (https://www.inlg2019.com/ ), immediately prior to EMNLP. INLG 2019 is organised by the AIST/Tokyo Institute of Technology (Japan). It is chaired by Kees van Deemter (Utrecht University, The Netherlands), Chenghua Lin (University of Aberdeen, UK), and Hiroya Takamura (AIST/Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan).

INLG 2020

In 2020, INLG will take place in Ireland (Dublin area).

Website

The SIGGEN website has been carefully checked and updated into the ACL Wiki. The web address www.siggen.org points to http://aclweb.org/aclwiki/index.php?title=SIGGEN. This is part of an ongoing process to revamp and update the website. A new design is coming.