2018Q3 Reports: SIGGEN

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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 422 members.

Board

An election was held in December 2016 for three positions on the SIGGEN board. The members elected in 2016, whose roles were assigned by consensus by the SIGGEN board, are the following:

Dimitra Gkatzia (Edinburgh Napier University, UK), Secretary
Amanda Stent (Bloomberg, USA), Treasurer
Amy Isard (University of Edinburgh, UK), student representative

In addition, there are the following serving members, whose term of elected office started on January 1, 2015:

Claire Gardent (CNRS and Lorraine University, Nancy, France), Chair
Albert Gatt (University of Malta), Member

The next SIGGEN board election is due to take place in December 2018.

Activities

Since the period covered in the last report for 2017, SIGGEN has been responsible for the following events.

INLG 2017

The 10th edition of INLG was held in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, on September 4-7, 2017. INLG 2017 was organised by the Intelligent Systems Unit of the Research Centre in Information Technologies (CiTIUS) of the University of Santiago de Compostela (USC) and University of Aberdeen , represented by Jose Alonso (CiTIUS-USC), Alberto Bugarin (CiTIUS-USC) and Ehud Reiter (University of Aberdeen).

Following the INLG 2016 template, INLG 2017 included, in addition to the main conference, several workshops, a tutorial, a hackathon as well as a Generation Challenge session featuring both a running challenge and proposals for future shared tasks.

Generation Challenges: WebNLG - http://talc1.loria.fr/webnlg/stories/challenge.html
CC-NLG 2017 : Computational Creativity in Natural Language Generation
6th Workshop on Recent Advances in RST and Related Formalisms .
LiRA-NLG 2017 : Linguistic Resources for Automatic Natural Language Generation Workshop.
XCI: Explainable Computational Intelligence
Tutorial: Ehud Reiter (University of Aberdeen): Evaluating Natural Language Generation Systems
SIGGEN Hackathon

INLG 2018

The next INLG is scheduled to take place in Tilburg, Netherlands, on November 5-8, 2018 ( https://inlg2018.uvt.nl/ ), immediately after EMNLP. INLG 2018 is 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 is chaired by Emiel Krahmer (Tilburg), Martijn Goudbeek (Tilburg) and Albert Gatt (Uni of Malta).

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.