20.1425, Calls: Computational Ling/Singapore

Wed Apr 15 20:05:05 UTC 2009

LINGUIST List: Vol-20-1425. Wed Apr 15 2009. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 20.1425, Calls: Computational Ling/Singapore

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1)
Date: 14-Apr-2009
From: Anja Belz < a.s.belz at brighton.ac.uk >
Subject: ACL-IJCNLP'09 Workshop on Language Generation and Summarisation

-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Wed, 15 Apr 2009 16:00:33
From: Anja Belz [a.s.belz at brighton.ac.uk]
Subject: ACL-IJCNLP'09 Workshop on Language Generation and Summarisation

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Full Title: ACL-IJCNLP'09 Workshop on Language Generation and Summarisation 
Short Title: UCNLG+Sum 

Date: 06-Aug-2009 - 06-Aug-2009
Location: Singapore, Singapore 
Contact Person: Anja Belz
Meeting Email: a.s.belz at brighton.ac.uk
Web Site: http://www.nltg.brighton.ac.uk/ucnlg/ucnlg09 

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics 

Call Deadline: 01-May-2009 

Meeting Description:

Language Generation and Summarisation (UCNLG+Sum) is a post-conference workshop
at ACL-IJCNLP 2009, Singapore, on 6 August 2009. 

Call for Paper

Background
There are many branches of NLP research which involve the generation of language
(summarisation, MT, human-computer dialogue, application front-ends,
data-to-text generation, document authoring, etc.). However, it is not always
easy to identify common ground among the generation components of these
application areas, which has sometimes made it difficult for generic research in
'Natural Language Generation' (NLG) to engage with them effectively. 

Recent advances in corpus-based approaches (both manual and automatic) across
many of these areas, and in particular in NLG itself, offer a new perspective on
this problem and the opportunity to explore synergies and differences from the
secure common grounding of corpus data.

This workshop is the third in an occasional series seeking to exploit this
opportunity by providing a forum for discussing NLG and its links with these
closely related fields from a corpus-oriented perspective. These workshops have
the general aims:
- to provide a forum for reporting and discussing corpus-oriented methods for
generating language;
- to foster cross-fertilisation between NLG and related fields by looking for
common ground through corpus-oriented approaches;
- to promote the sharing of data and methods in all language generation research.

Each of these workshops has a special theme: at the first workshop (at Corpus
Linguistics in 2005) it was the use of corpora in NLG, at the second (at MT
Summit in 2007) it was Language Generation and Machine Translation. The special
theme of the 2009 workshop is Language Generation and Summarisation.

Aims of this Workshop
There are two basic approaches to text summarisation: abstractive, where texts
are analysed, and a more condensed version is regenerated, and extractive, where
key passages of the input texts themselves are identified and then `glued
together' to form a shorter text. Extractive summarisation is less dependent on
analysis and regeneration techniques, but tends to produce summaries that are
not very coherent and whose referring expressions are not very clear (so for
example, extractive systems often score low on the DUC human assessment criteria
of Coherence and Referential Clarity).

The relevance of NLG techniques to abstractive summarisation is clear, but
recently there has also been increasing interest in regeneration as a
post-process for extractive summaries.  Work by Otterbacher et al., Steinberger
et al. and Nenkova et al., for example, shows how regeneration of (parts of)
extractive summaries may help to increase their coherence, referential clarity
or fluency.  At the same time, NLG researchers are investigating techniques that
could be used to improve extractive summaries by regenerating them (in
particular in the subfield of referring expression generation, see for example
the GREC Shared Task papers at INLG 2008).

The core aim of this workshop is to provide a forum for NLG and summarisation
researchers to examine the similarities and differences between their current
approaches to generating language, and to explore the potential for
cross-fertilisation.

Topics of Interest
We invite submissions on all aspects of using corpora in the generation of
language, with a particular interest in relevance to text summarisation. 
Specific topics include, but are not limited to:
- generation techniques in abstractive summarisation
- regeneration/rewriting/post-processing techniques for extractive summarisation
- generation of references to named entities in discourse context
- annotating corpora for language generation and summarisation
- uses of corpora in the evaluation of language generation and summarisation systems
- reuse of corpus resources developed for NLU (e.g. treebanks) in language
generation and summarisation
- domain-specific vs. general-purpose corpora for language generation and
summarisation
- statistical approaches to language generation and summarisation
- machine learning methods for language generation and summarisation

Requirements
Papers should describe original and unpublished work, emphasizing actual rather
than intended work, and should indicate clearly the state of completion of the
reported work.  Wherever appropriate, concrete evaluation results should be
included.  Papers that are being submitted to other conferences or workshops
should indicate this.

Submission information
Submissions should be no longer than 8 (eight) pages, and should follow the
ACL-IJCNLP 2009 guidelines using the style files provided at
http://www.acl-ijcnlp-2009.org/main/authors/stylefiles/. Papers should be
submitted in PDF format using the START submission website for the workshop at
https://www.softconf.com/acl-ijcnlp09/UCNLGSum/. The deadline for submission is
1 May 2009.

Each paper will be reviewed by at least three programme committee members. 
Final decisions on the technical programme will be made by the workshop organisers.

As reviewing will be blind, papers should not include the authors' names and
affiliations.  Self-references that reveal the authors' identity, e.g., "We
previously showed (Smith, 1991) ...", should be avoided. Instead, use citations
such as "Smith previously showed (Smith, 1991) ...".  Acknowledgments sections
should be removed before submission.

Proceedings
The proceedings of the workshop will be edited by the workshop organisers and
published by the ACL-IJCNLP 2009 conference organisers.

Important Dates
01 May 2009      Deadline for papers submissions
22 May 2009      Notification of acceptance to authors of workshop papers
07 June 2009     Camera-ready copies due
06 August 2009   UCNLG+SUM workshop in Singapore

Invited Speaker
Kathy McKeown, Columbia University, USA.

Panel on Common Ground between Summarisation and Language Generation

Panelists t.b.a.

GREC'09 Challenges Special Session
UCNLG+Sum will host the results session of this year's GREC Shared Task
Competitions which are part of the Generation Challenges initiative.  The first
is the GREC-MSR (Main Subject Reference) Task which uses the GREC-2.0 Corpus of
2,000 Wikipedia introduction sections in which references to the main subject of
the Wikipedia article have been annotated, and the task is to develop a system
that can select (from a given list) an MSR that is appropriate in the context. 
The second is the GREC-NEG (Named Entity Generation) Task which uses the new
GREC-People Corpus of 1,000 Wikipedia introduction sections about people in
which single and plural references to all people mentioned in the text have been
annotated.  The task in GREC-NEG is to select appropriate referential
expressions for all mentions (singular and plural) of people.  For full details
including the GREC'09 call for participation, please go to the GREC'09 homepage
at http://www.nltg.brighton.ac.uk/research/genchal09/grec

Programme Committee
Enrique Alfonseca, Google Zurich, Switzerland
Srinivas Bangalore, AT&T, USA
Robert Dale, Macquarie University, Australia
Daniel Marcu, ISI, University of Southern California, USA
Chris Mellish, University of Aberdeen, UK
Ani Nenkova, University of Pennsylvania, USA
Amanda Stent, SUNY, USA
Michael Strube, EML Research, Germany
Stephen Wan, Macquarie University, Australia
Mike White, Ohio State University, USA
Jianguo Xiao, Peking University, China

Workshop organisers
Anja Belz, NLTG, University of Brighton, UK
Sebastian Varges, Information Engineering and Computer Science, University of
Trento, Italy
Roger Evans, NLTG, University of Brighton, UK

Workshop website: http://www.nltg.brighton.ac.uk/ucnlg/ucnlg09
Contact email: ucnlg at itri.brighton.ac.uk

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