19.1095, FYI: Generation Challenges 2009: Announcement

Wed Apr 2 19:11:25 UTC 2008

LINGUIST List: Vol-19-1095. Wed Apr 02 2008. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 19.1095, FYI: Generation Challenges 2009: Announcement

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1)
Date: 02-Apr-2008
From: Albert Gatt < a.gatt at abdn.ac.uk >
Subject: Generation Challenges 2009: Announcement

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-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Wed, 02 Apr 2008 15:09:55
From: Albert Gatt [a.gatt at abdn.ac.uk]
Subject: Generation Challenges 2009: Announcement
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Announcement and First Call for Task Proposals

GENERATION CHALLENGES 2009
--------------------------

To be held in conjunction with ENLG 2009.

Following the NSF/SIGGEN Workshop on Shared Tasks and Comparative
Evaluation in NLG in April 2007
(http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/~mwhite/nlgeval07/), and the INLG'06
Special Session on Sharing Data and Comparative Evaluation
(http://www.nltg.brighton.ac.uk/home/Anja.Belz/inlg06-specsess.html),
there has recently been a lot of activity involving shared tasks in Natural
Language Generation (NLG).  The Pilot Attribute Selection for Generating
Referring Expressions (ASGRE) Challenge took place between May and
September 2007; the Referring Expression Generation (REG) Challenge
2008 is currently underway; and other challenges are being prepared.

To provide a common forum for these activities, we are organising
Generation Challenges 2009, an umbrella event designed to bring together a
variety of shared-task evaluation efforts that involve the generation of
natural language.  The following is a provisional list of tasks that have
been proposed so far:

1. The GIVE Challenge (Koller, Byron, Moore, Oberlander & Striegnitz):
Generation of natural-language instructions to aid human task-solving in a
virtual environment.

2. GREC Task (Belz, Gatt & Viethen): Generation of references to named
entities in discourse; exact task definition to be announced.

3. TUNA Progress Test (Gatt & Belz): An opportunity to improve on REG'08
Task 3, i.e. mapping from TUNA domain representations to referring expressions.

At this point, we invite any team of researchers interested in organising a
shared task as part of the Generation Challenges 2009 event to submit a
task proposal.

This is not intended to be a selective process.  Anyone interested in
running a shared task as part of Generation Challenges 2009 is in principle
welcome to do so.  We would simply like to get an idea of how many tasks
there are likely to be for organisational purposes, and also to be able to
offer advice and support where needed.  In the unlikely event that more
tasks are proposed than can be accommodated, we would make a selection
together with the ENLG'09 organisers.

Each team of task organisers will be reponsible for organising and
evaluating their task.  The Generation Challenges 2009 coordinators will
merely coordinate issues relating to the ENLG'09 special session,
presentations and reports.

Please send task proposals to gre-stec at itri.brighton.ac.uk by 31 May 2008.
 Please bear in mind the timeline below, and include information regarding
organisers, task description, size and state of completion of data to be
used, evaluation plans and provisional timeline.

Don't hesitate to get in touch with any questions.  Best wishes,

Anja Belz and Albert Gatt

Generation Challenges 2009 Timeline:

Deadline for submission of task proposals	31 May 2008
Recommended first call for participation	Jun 2008
Recommended availability of training data	Jul-Aug 2008
Recommended evaluation period			Feb 2009
Expected deadline for camera-ready reports	end Feb 2009
ENLG'09	(provisional)				30-31 March 2009 

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics

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