<div>Announcement of Tasks and Call for Papers</div><div><br></div><div>GENERATION CHALLENGES 2012</div><div>--------------------------</div><div><br></div><div>To be held in conjunction with INLG 2012, 30 May-01 June 2012, Starved Rock, IL, USA.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Over the past five years, there has been a lot of activity in</div><div>connection with shared tasks in Natural Language Generation (NLG).</div><div>Six separate sets of shared tasks each with its own data and team of</div>
<div>organisers have so far been run: TUNA (Gatt et al.), GREC (Belz et</div><div>al.), GIVE (Koller et al.), QG (Rus et al.), HOO (Dale and Kilgarriff)</div><div>SR (Belz, White et al.). The Pilot Attribute Selection for</div>
<div>Generating Referring Expressions (ASGRE) Challenge took place in 2007</div><div>(TUNA); the Referring Expression Generation (REG) Challenge in 2008</div><div>(TUNA, GREC); the first, second and third Generation Challenges umbrella</div>
<div>events encompassing diverse sets of shared tasks, took place in 2009</div><div>(TUNA, GREC and GIVE), 2010 (QG, GREC and GIVE) and 2011 (HOO, SR); other shared tasks</div><div>are being prepared. More information about all of these activities</div>
<div>can be found via the links on the Generation Challenges 2012 homepage:</div><div><a href="http://www.nltg.brighton.ac.uk/research/genchal12">http://www.nltg.brighton.ac.uk/research/genchal12</a>.</div><div><br></div>
<div>In order to continue to provide a common forum for these activities,</div><div>we are organising Generation Challenges 2012 (GenChal'12), an umbrella</div><div>event designed to bring together a variety of shared-task evaluation</div>
<div>efforts that involve the generation of natural language. For some of the </div><div>tasks, evaluation results and participating systems will be presented at </div><div>the Generation Challenges 2012 Special Session at the 7TH International </div>
<div>Natural Language Generation Conference (INLG'12). The session will follow the</div><div>format of previous GenChal results sessions, with presentations of</div><div>results by the organisers of the different shared tasks, as well as</div>
<div>presentations of proposals for new shared tasks in the Task Proposals</div><div>Track. As at GenChal'10 and GenChal'11, we envisage having a poster session where</div><div>participants in the various shared tasks will have the opportunity to</div>
<div>present their approaches and results. In addition, we are planning to</div><div>have break-out sessions for individual tasks, providing further</div><div>opportunity for current and future task participants to exchange ideas</div>
<div>and feed back to the organisers.</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>1. Shared Tasks:</div><div> - - - - - - - -</div><div><br></div><div>The GenChal'12 meeting will be held at INLG'12 in Starved Rock, IL, USA,</div>
<div>30 May-01 June 2012, but the timetables of the individual tasks are not</div><div>completely aligned, and they will be organised independently (for</div><div>details, please refer to the Call for Participation for each</div>
<div>task). The following is the list of tasks that are running in 2012:</div><div><br></div><div>1. Surface Realisation Task 2012: (White, Wanner, Bohnet, Hogan, Stent,</div><div>Belz et al.): Generation of sentences from shallow and deep input</div>
<div>represenations. Call for Participation in preparation.</div><div><br></div><div>2. Helping Our Own (HOO) (Dale): Text-to-text generation</div><div>task aiming to improve the quality of texts, in particular those</div>
<div>written by non-native speakers. Call for Registration has been </div><div>posted: <a href="http://clt.mq.edu.au/research/projects/hoo/hoo2012/callforregistration.html">http://clt.mq.edu.au/research/projects/hoo/hoo2012/callforregistration.html</a>.</div>
<div>The official HOO results session will be hosted at BEA'12. A summary report</div><div>will be presented at GenChal'12.</div><div><br></div><div>2. QG'12 (Rus et al.): Question Generation task aiming to generate questions</div>
<div>given answers in the form of Natural Language text. Although the QG task will not </div><div>be running in 2012, there will be an update report presented at GenChal'12.</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>2. Track on Proposals for Future Tasks:</div>
<div>- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -</div><div><br></div><div>We invite submissions of papers describing ideas for future shared</div><div>tasks in the general area of language generation. Proposed tasks can</div>
<div>be in the area of core NLG, or in other research areas in which</div><div>language is generated, e.g. text-to-text generation (including MT and</div><div>summarisation), combining core NLG and MT, or combining core NLG and</div>
<div>text summarisation. Submissions should describe possible future tasks</div><div>in detail, including information regarding organisers, task</div><div>description, motivating theoretical interest and/or application</div>
<div>context, size and state of completion of data to be used, and</div><div>evaluation plans.</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>3. Instructions for Paper Submissions:</div><div>- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -</div>
<div><br></div><div>Submissions in the Task Proposals Track should be no more than 4 (four) </div><div>pages long excluding citations, and should</div><div>follow the ACL'12 guidelines using the style files provided via the</div>
<div>ACL 2012 homepage. Papers should be sent in PDF format by email to</div><div><a href="mailto:nlg-stec@itri.brighton.ac.uk">nlg-stec@itri.brighton.ac.uk</a>. Task Proposal papers should be submitted </div><div>no later than 15 April 2012.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Submissions will be reviewed by at least 3 members of the Generation</div><div>Challenges Steering Committee (see below). As reviewing will not be</div><div>blind, there is no need to anonymise papers. This is not intended to be</div>
<div>a selective process, but the organisers reserve the right to reject papers </div><div>which do not fall within the scope of the GenChal initiative, or which do </div><div>not follow guidelines.</div><div><br></div><div>
Accepted submissions will be included in the INLG'12 proceedings, but</div><div>the page limit for camera-ready versions has not yet been finalised</div><div>(the final limit will depend on how many submissions there are).</div>
<div><br></div><div><br></div><div>6. Dates:</div><div>- - - - -</div><div><br></div><div>Paper submission<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span> 10th April 2012</div><div>Notification of acceptance<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>15th April 2012</div>
<div>Submission of camera-ready papers<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>22nd April 2012</div><div>INLG'12<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span> <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>30 May-01 June 2012</div>
<div><br></div><div>NB: Submission deadlines for the GenChal'12 Shared Tasks differ and can be</div><div>found in the calls for participation for the tasks.</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>7. Generation Challenges Steering Committee:</div>
<div>- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - --------------------------</div><div><br></div><div>Anja Belz, NLTG, University of Brighton, UK</div><div>Albert Gatt, University of Malta and University of Aberdeen, UK</div>
<div>Alexander Koller, Saarland University, Germany</div><div>Robert Dale, Macquarie University, Australia</div><div>Kevin Knight, ISI, University of Southern California, USA</div><div>Chris Mellish, University of Aberdeen, UK</div>
<div>Johanna Moore, University of Edinburgh, UK</div><div>Amanda Stent, AT&T Labs, USA</div><div>Kristina Striegnitz, Union College, USA</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>8. Organisation:</div><div>- - - - - - - - -</div>
<div><br></div><div>Anja Belz, NLTG, University of Brighton, UK</div><div>Albert Gatt, University of Malta and University of Aberdeen, UK</div><div>Alexander Koller, Saarland University, Germany</div><div>Kristina Striegnitz, Union College, US</div>
<div><br></div><div>Generation Challenges 2012 homepage: <a href="http://www.nltg.brighton.ac.uk/research/genchal12">http://www.nltg.brighton.ac.uk/research/genchal12</a></div><div>Generation Challenges 2012 email: <a href="mailto:nlg-stec@itri.brighton.ac.uk">nlg-stec@itri.brighton.ac.uk</a></div>
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