2016Q3 Reports: SIGGEN
ACL Special Interest Group on Natural Language Generation (SIGGEN)
Report 2016
Summary
SIGGEN is the Special Interest group on Natural Language Generation, the study of systems and methods to generate text or speech from both nonlinguistic and linguistic input.
Membership
Currently, SIGGEN has around 389 members.
Board
An election was held in December 2014 for three positions on the SIGGEN board. The members elected in 2014 are the following:
- Claire Gardent (CNRS and Lorraine University, Nancy), Chair
- Albert Gatt (University of Malta), Secretary
- Xiao Li (University of Aberdeen, UK), student representative
In addition, there are 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
The next SIGGEN board election is due to take place in December 2016.
Activities
Since the period covered in the last report for 2015, SIGGEN has been responsible for the following events.
International Conference on Natural Language Generation (INLG)
The main activity of SIGGEN is the International Conference on Natural Language Generation, a biennial meeting. The 9th edition of INLG[1] will be held in Edinburgh, UK, on September 5-8, 2016. INLG 2016 is jointly organised by all three universities in Edinburgh, represented by Amy Isard (University of Edinburgh), Dimitra Gkatzia (Edinburgh Napier University) and Verena Rieser (Heriot-Watt University). During the last SIGGEN-endorsed event, the European Workshop on NLG, held in Brighton in 2015, it was decided, based on consultation with conference attendees and SIGGEN members, to extend this year’s event to include a number of workshops and tutorials. Three SIGGEN-endorsed events will be organised in tandem with INLG 2016; these are described in the next section.
The next ENLG is scheduled to take place in 2017. Currently, the SIGGEN board is taking the necessary steps to identify the local organizers and program committee chairs for the next event.
SIGGEN-endorsed events
SIGGEN has also endorsed the following events, to be colocated with INLG 2016 [2] (see INLG 2016 webpage for details)
- Generation Challenges: GenChal 2016 [3]
- WebNLG 2016 [4]: 2nd International Workshop on Natural Language Generation and the Semantic Web.
- CC-NLG [5]: Computational Creativity in Natural Language Generation
- Tutorial [6]: Tsung Hsien Wen (University of Cambridge) on Deep Learning and NLG
- SIGGEN Hackathon [7]
Financial report
SIGGEN's financial position continues to be extremely healthy, with $10,461.53 in our account. We did not have any expenditures last year. We are in the process of implementing policies to spend part of the money to support some student travel to the next INLG 2016.
Website
The SIGGEN website with all information has been moved into the ACL Wiki. The web address changed from www.siggen.org to http://aclweb.org/aclwiki/index.php?title=SIGGEN . This is part of an ongoing process to revamp and update the website.