2023Q3 Reports: SIGGEN

ACL Special Interest Group on Natural Language Generation (SIGGEN): 2022 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 490 members.

Board

The current SIGGEN board, elected in December 2022, is:

• Emiel van Miltenburg (Tilburg University, The Netherlands), Chair (term expires in 2024)
• Chenghua Lin (University of Sheffield, UK), Secretary (term expires in 2026)
• David Howcroft (Edinburgh Napier University, Scotland, UK), Treasurer (term expires in 2026)
• Raquel Hervás (Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain), Member (term expires in 2024)
• Javier González Corbelle (University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain), Student representative (term expires in 2024)

The next SIGGEN board election is due to take place in December 2024, and new board members will be elected to replace van Miltenburg, Hervás, and González Corbelle.

Activities

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

INLG 2022

The 15th INLG was a hybrid conference, held for in person attendees at Colby College in Waterville, ME (USA) on 18-22 July 2022 (https://inlgmeeting.github.io/).

Other Events

SIGGEN also endorsed and supported the following events:

• GEM 2022 workshop, held at EMNLP 2022 (https://gem-benchmark.com/workshop)
• NLG4Health - First Workshop on Natural Language Generation in Healthcare (as part of the INLG 2022 conference) (https://nlg4health.uvt.nl/index.html).
• SIGGEN webinar series (https://siggen-acl.github.io/pages/webinar.html):

- "Measuring the Quality of NLG Systems" by Sebastian Gehrmann, April 2022 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSuefO4CkHQ)

Upcoming events

INLG-2023 will take place in Prague on September 11-15, 2023 (https://inlg2023.github.io/). It will be held jointly with the 24th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDial 2023).

In addition, the SIGGEN webinar series will continue through 2023.

Website

The new website was released in 2022: https://siggen-acl.github.io/.