2020Q3 Reports: SIGGEN

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ACL Special Interest Group on Natural Language Generation (SIGGEN): 2019 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 400 members.

Board

The current SIGGEN boardis

Ehud Reiter (Aberdeen University, UK), Chair (term expires in 2022)
Jose M. Alonso (University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain), Secretary (term expires in 2022)
Amanda Curry (Heriot-Watt University, UK), student representative (term expires in 2020)
Dimitra Gkatzia (Edinburgh Napier University, UK), Member (term expires in 2020)
Amanda Stent (Bloomberg, USA), Treasurer (term expires in 2020)

The next SIGGEN board election is due to take place in December 2020, and new board members will be elected to replace Curry, Gkatzia, and Stent.

Activities

Since the period covered in the last report for 2019, SIGGEN has been responsible for the following events.

INLG 2019

The 12th INLG conference was held in Tokyo, Japan, on 29 October - 1 November 2019 (https://www.inlg2019.com/). This is the first time INLG has ever been held in Asia; it is encouraging and exciting to see the growth of interest in NLG in Asia which makes this possible!

INLG 2019 included several workshops in addition to the main conference:

1st Workshop on Interactive Natural Language Technology for Explainable Artificial Intelligence
1st Workshop on AI Werewolf and Dialog System
4th Workshop on Computational Creativity in Language Generation
1st Workshop on Discourse Structure in Neural NLG

Other Events

SIGGEN also endorsed and supported the 2nd Workshop on Multilingual Surface Realisation (MSR 2019), which was an EMNLP workshop

upcoming events

INLG-2020 will happen in Dublin. It was originally scheduled for Sep 2020, but was postponed to Dec 2020 because of the Covid lockdown. It is chaired by Brian Davis (Dublin City University), with support from the Adapt centre. It seems likely that INLG 2020 will be online at least in part.

SIGGEN is also sponsoring and supporting a workshop on Intelligent Information Processing and Natural Language Generation at ECAI-2020. It will be online.

Website

We have updated and expanded the resources and data set section of the SIGGEN web page.