2024Q3 Reports: SIGGEN

ACL Special Interest Group on Natural Language Generation (SIGGEN): 2023 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 492 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 2023

The 16th INLG was an in-person conference (with the possibility of hybrid attendance for non-presenters), held jointly with the 24th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDial). The conference was located in Prague (URLs: https://inlg2023.github.io, https://2023.sigdial.org).

As listed in the INLG proceedings: "The conference took place from 13 to 15 September. For the main track, we received a total of 98 conference submissions, 4 ARR submissions, and 4 demo paper submissions. After review by at least three program committee members and a meta review from the area chairs, 19 were accepted as long papers, 17 as short papers, and 4 as demo papers." Next to these papers, there were 20 papers in the Generation Challenges track.

There were also separate proceedings for SIGDial with additional papers.

Other Events

SIGGEN and SIGDIAL also supported the following workshops at the conference:

• YRRSDS: 19th Young Researchers' Roundtable on Spoken Dialogue Systems
• The 1st Workshop on Counter Speech for Online Abuse
• DSTC11: The 11th Dialog System Technology Challenge
• PracticalD2T: 1st Workshop on Practical LLM-assisted Data-to-Text Generation
• Taming Large Language Models: Controllability in the era of Interactive Assistants
• Workshop on Multimodal, Multilingual Natural Language Generation and Multilingual WebNLG Challenge
• Connecting multiple disciplines to AI techniques in interaction-centric autism research and diagnosis
• Designing divergent agent tasks for SDS data collection

SIGGEN also continued the webinar series (https://siggen-acl.github.io/pages/webinar.html):

• "7 Characteristics of Highly Effective Data-to-Text Systems" by Ross Turner, June 2023 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1o4PVhfl3rE)

Upcoming events

INLG-2024 will take place in Tokyo on September 23-27 2024 (https://inlg2024.github.io/). This year the conference will not be held jointly with SIGDIAL, but instead, it follows SIGDIAL which is organized the week before in Kyoto.

In addition, the SIGGEN webinar series will continue through 2024.

Website

The website continues to be hosted at: https://siggen-acl.github.io/.