Appel: ACL NLG WORKSHOP, submission deadline 22 Apr

Thierry Hamon thierry.hamon at lipn.univ-paris13.fr
Mon Apr 23 10:51:51 UTC 2001


Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2001 04:17:27 -0400
From: "Nicolas Nicolov" <nicolas at us.ibm.com>
Message-Id: <OFB49CA8FE.0440AEB4-ON85256A32.002D28D5 at pok.ibm.com>
X-url: http://www.cs.unca.edu/~bruce/acl01/NLG.html
X-url: http://acl2001.dfki.de/style/


                            ACL/EACL 2001 Workshop

            8th EUROPEAN WORKSHOP ON NATURAL LANGUAGE GENERATION

                               6-7 July 2001
                              Toulouse, France

                http://www.cs.unca.edu/~bruce/acl01/NLG.html

                     Sponsored by IBM, Endorsed by SIGGEN

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Natural language generation (NLG) constitutes the production of
meaningful texts in natural languages from some underlying
non-linguistic representation of information. Accomplishing this goal
may be envisioned for a number of different purposes, including
standardized and/or multi-lingual reports, summaries, machine
translation, dialog applications, and embedding in multi-media and
hypertext environments. Consequently, the automated production of
language is associated with a large number of highly diverse tasks
whose appropriate orchestration in high quality poses a variety of
theoretical and practical problems. Relevant issues include content
selection, text organization, the production of referring expressions,
aggregation, lexicalization, and surface realization, as well as
coordination with other media.

This workshop is part of a bi-annual series of workshops about natural
language generation that runs since 1987. Previous European workshops
have been held at Royaumont, Edinburgh, Judenstein, Pisa, Leiden,
Duisburg, and Toulouse. The goal of the workshop is to be an informal
meeting which facilitates the dissemination of knowledge and expertise
in the field. The workshop will focus on the following topics:

   * Search methods for NLG (in content planning and realization)

     There seems to be a substantial discrepancy between
     application-oriented systems and principled approaches to NLG.
     Accomodating a standard pipeline architecture with suitable
     heuristic preferences to the intended functionality of a system
     stands in contrast to several principled approaches to searching
     which have been tried out so far. These include blackboard
     architectures, constraint propagation and, more recently genetic
     algorithms and statistical techniques. A comparison of these
     methods in terms of their potential and limitations is likely to
     improve understanding about this issue.  Gained insights could
     prove fruitful for building applications in a more general and,
     thus, better reusable way, especially in large-scale applications
     such as summarization and machine translation.

   * Differences in information organization between source and
     presentation specifications (and methods to bridge between these)

     Whether the generation task is to verbally express contents of
     some knowledge base or to produce multi-lingual presentations
     from language-neutral or similar representations, there are
     strong similarities in building the target representations: In
     the overwhelming number of cases, the ordering and embedding of
     elements in the source representation is reflected by the
     ordering and embedding of their corresponding realizations at the
     surface. Often, this reflection is systematic, many times even
     simple. But a few cases prove complex and involve a major
     restructuring of the surface structure when compared to the
     source structure. A major emphasis of this topic is on collecting
     such complex cases, identifying commonalities between them and
     discussing restructuring techniques.

Accepted papers on these and related topics will be scheduled for
presentation.
The majority of the time will be devoted to discussions, either in
sequence or in parallel, depending on the number of participants. We
are considering organizing a panel. For the focus topics above, we
will contact a number of competent researchers to address the topic
from a specific perspective according to their experience. In
addition, we will ask some of them to prepare material / concrete
examples for discussions.


WORKSHOP CHAIRS

          Helmut Horacek    Univ. of the Saarland
          Nicolas Nicolov   IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
          Leo Wanner        Univ. of Stuttgart


PROGRAMME COMMITTEE

          John Bateman      Univ. of Bremen
          Dan Cristea       Univ. of Iasi
          Robert Dale       Macquarie University
          Laurence Danlos   Universite Paris 7
          Marc Dymetman     Xerox Research Centre Europe, Grenoble
          Michael Elhadad   Ben-Gurion Univ.
          Kristiina Jokinen Univ. of Art and Design Helsinki
          Richard Kittredge Univ. of Montreal & CoGenTex
          Daniel Marcu      ISI, Univ. of Southern California
          Chris Mellish     Univ. of Edinburgh
          Sergei Nirenburg  CRL, New Mexico
          Owen Rambow       AT&T Research
          Ehud Reiter       Univ. of Aberdeen
          Manfred Stede     Technical University of Berlin
          Michael Zock      LIMSI, CNRS


SUBMISSIONS (papers, posters, demos)

Papers describing original work in the area of NLG in particular
related to the workshop focus topics above should be submitted
electronically. Papers should be 6-8 pages long in PDF format. We
recommend a A4, two-column format like the ACL proceedings:
http://acl2001.dfki.de/style/

We also invite poster and demo submissions (free format, up to 6 page,
PDF).

The submissions should be associated with a cover email containing the
following information (ASCII text):

          # TITLE:    <title of the paper>
          # AUTHORS:  <list of authors>
          # EMAIL:    <email of author(s) for correspondence>
          # KEYWORDS: <keywords, topic sub-areas, ...>
          # TYPE:     <paper> / <poster> / <demo>
          # ABSTRACT: <abstract of the paper>

Send your submission to Helmut Horacek <horacek at cs.uni-sb.de>.


IMPORTANT DATES

          Paper submissions           *** 22 April 2001 ***
          Notification of acceptance  6 May 2001
          Camera-ready copies due     16 May 2001
          Registration deadline       as ACL
          Workshop dates              6-7 July 2001


REGISTRATION

The registration fee for the workshop will be posted at a later
stage. The registration fee includes attendance of the workshop and a
copy of workshop proceedings. Follow the registration instructions at
the ACL site and indicate that you would like to attend the NLG
workshop.

People wishing to attend the workshop but not submitting papers should
send a notification of attendance: a 1-2 page stating interest to
participate, work done in NLG so far, and potential contributions /
material for discussions about one of the topics. This informationn
will help with the organisation of discussions and allow for an
informal and highly interactive character of the
workshop. Notifications of attendance should be sent to Leo Wanner
<wannerlo at informatik.uni-stuttgart.de>.


MORE INFORMATION

          Check the following web site for updates about the NLG workshop:
          http://www.cs.unca.edu/~bruce/acl01/NLG.html


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