20.2228, Confs: Computational Linguistics/Singapore

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LINGUIST List: Vol-20-2228. Thu Jun 18 2009. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 20.2228, Confs: Computational Linguistics/Singapore

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1)
Date: 17-Jun-2009
From: Sebastian Varges < varges at disi.unitn.it >
Subject: Workshop on Language Generation and Summarisation
 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Thu, 18 Jun 2009 22:40:11
From: Sebastian Varges [varges at disi.unitn.it]
Subject: Workshop on Language Generation and Summarisation

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Workshop on Language Generation and Summarisation 
Short Title: UCNLG+Sum 

Date: 06-Aug-2009 - 06-Aug-2009 
Location: Singapore, Singapore 
Contact: Sebastian Varges 
Contact Email: varges at disi.unitn.it 
Meeting URL: http://www.nltg.brighton.ac.uk/ucnlg/ucnlg09/ 

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics 

Meeting Description: 

ACL-IJCNLP 2009 Workshop: Language Generation and Summarisation (UCNLG+Sum),
Singapore, 6 August 2009.

Early registration through June 30, 2009
Workshop programme included below

http://www.nltg.brighton.ac.uk/ucnlg/ucnlg09/

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 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 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:

  1. To provide a forum for reporting and discussing corpus-oriented methods for generating language;
  2. To foster cross-fertilisation between NLG and other fields of research involving generation of language; and
  3. To promote the sharing of data and methods in all research that involves the generation of language.

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 XI 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. 

Invited Speaker:
Kathy McKeown, Columbia University, USA
Title: Query-focused Summarization Using Text-to-Text Generation: When
Information Comes from Multilingual Sources

Panel on Sharing Data and Tools and Other Synergies Between Summarisation and NLG

Panelists: Ed Hovy, ISI; Kathy McKeown, Columbia; Donia Scott, Open
University; others t.b.c.

Complete UCNLG+Sum Workshop Programme:

08:30-10:00 Morning Session 1: Sentence Compression and Revision:

08:30-09:00 Joao Cordeiro, Gael Dias and Pavel Brazdil:
Unsupervised Induction of Sentence Compression Rules

09:00-09:30 Wei Xu and Ralph Grishman:
A Parse-and-Trim Approach with Information Significance for Chinese Sentence Compression

09:30-10:00 Hideki Tanaka, Akinori Kinoshita, Takeshi Kobayakawa, Tadashi Kumano and Naoto Katoh:
Syntax-Driven Sentence Revision for Broadcast News Summarization

10:00-10:30 Coffee Break

10:30-12:30 Morning Session 2: Invited Talk / Content Selection:

10:30-11:30 Invited Talk - Kathy McKeown:
 Query-focused Summarization Using Text-to-Text Generation: When Information Comes from Multilingual Sources

11:30-12:00 Horacio Saggion:
A Classification Algorithm for Predicting the Structure of Summaries

12:00-12:30 Jackie Chi Kit Cheung, Giuseppe Carenini and Raymond Ng:
Optimization-based Content Selection for Opinion Summarization

12:30-13:50 Lunch

13:50-15:30 Afternoon Session 1: Evaluation
 
13:50-15:00 GREC Shared Task Evaluation results session

15:00-15:30 Karolina Owkzarzak and Hoa Trang Dang:
Evaluation of Automatic Summaries: Metrics under Varying Data Conditions

15:30-16:00 Coffee Break

16:00-18:00 Afternoon Session 2: Short Papers / Discussion

16:00-16:20 Maria Fernanda Caropreso, Diana Inkpen, Shahzad Khan and Fazel Keshtkar:
Visual Development Process for Automatic Generation of Digital Games Narrative Content
 
16:20-16:40 Iris Hendrickx, Walter Daelemans, Erwin Marsi and Emiel Krahmer:
Reducing Redundancy in Multi-document Summarization Using Lexical Semantic Similarity

16:40-17:00 Mohit Kumar, Dipanjan Das, Sachin Agarwal and Alexander Rudnicky:
Non-textual Event Summarization by Applying Machine Learning to Template-based Language Generation

17:00-17:20 Stephanie Schuldes, Michael Roth, Anette Frank and Michael Strube:
Creating an Annotated Corpus for Generating Walking Directions

17:20-18:00 Panel-led discussion on synergies between summarisation and NLG, including shared tasks

Workshop Organisers:
Anja Belz, University of Brighton, UK
Roger Evans, University of Brighton, UK
Sebastian Varges, University of Trento, Italy

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, Universiy 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





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