2013Q3 Reports: SIGGEN

ACL SIGGEN report 2012-2013

SIGGEN continues to be a valued shared resource for an active and developing community of researchers in natural language generation. In the past year, we held board elections, supported the organization of the European Workshop on Natural Language Generation, and maintained our web presence. We are currently planning for the next edition of the biennial International Conference on Natural Language Generation (INLG).

SIGGEN held board elections in late 2012 to replace Sebastian Varges, Cécile Paris and Margaret Mitchell, whose terms ended on December 31st, 2012. The ballot closed at the end of December 27th 2012. 70 members voted, which is 25% of the SIGGEN mailing list (285 addresses). Barbara Di Eugenio (University of Illinois at Chicago) and Verena Rieser (Heriot Watt University) were elected as full members for terms of four years and Shashi Narayan (Université de Lorraine and Loria) was elected as the student member for a term of two years. Ielka van der Sluis (Groningen University) and Kristina Striegnitz (Union College) will continue to serve as board members as their terms have not ended, yet.

SIGGEN organises the biennial INLG conferences. We are currently planning for INLG 2014. The number of submissions received by INLG 2012 was somewhat lower than what we had expected. To promote INLG 2014 more effectively, we are exploring organizing INLG 2014 in the Baltimore area directly before or after ACL 2014. We are also discussing with SIGdial the possibility of organizing a joint special session on natural language generation for dialog.

In addition, SIGGEN offers (non-financial) endorsement to workshops and activities related to language generation. This year we were pleased to support the 14th European Workshop on Natural Language Generation (ENLG 2013; http://www.um.edu.mt/events/enlg2013), which is organized as an ACL workshop taking place on August 8th and 9th in Sofia, Bulgaria. The organizers are Albert Gatt (University of Malta) and Horacio Saggion (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona). ENLG received 35 submissions (23 long, 10 short, 2 demo). 13 long papers were accepted to be presented orally, 3 long and 7 short papers were accepted for poster presentation, and 2 demos were accepted for presentation.

Building on the work of our previous webmaster Margaret Mitchell, Shashi Narayan has taken over the responsibility of maintaining the SIGGEN website (http://www.siggen.org).

SIGGEN's financial position continues to be extremely healthy, mainly because the last two INLG conferences both ended with a surplus. SIGGEN now has USD 9317 in its sub-account. We are currently in the process of formulating a financial policy which will reserve a certain amount for emergencies, such as the INLG conference ending up in the red, and allow us to spend the rest of the money on fellowships to students’ participating in INLG and support for other endorsed events.

Barbara Di Eugenio, Shashi Narayan, Verena Rieser, Kristina Striegnitz and Ielka van der Sluis SIGGEN board 10 July 2013