23.1135, FYI: Generation Challenges 2012: Announcement and CFP

Tue Mar 6 18:36:47 UTC 2012

LINGUIST List: Vol-23-1135. Tue Mar 06 2012. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 23.1135, FYI: Generation Challenges 2012: Announcement and CFP

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Date: Tue, 06 Mar 2012 13:36:37
From: Albert Gatt [albert.gatt at um.edu.mt]
Subject: Generation Challenges 2012: Announcement and CFP

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Announcement of Tasks and Call for Papers

Generation Challenges 2012

To be held in conjunction with INLG 2012, 30 May-01 June 2012, 
Starved Rock, IL, USA.

Over the past five years, there has been a lot of activity in connection 
with shared tasks in Natural Language Generation (NLG). Six separate 
sets of shared tasks each with its own data and team of organisers 
have so far been run: TUNA (Gatt et al.), GREC (Belz et al.), GIVE 
(Koller et al.), QG (Rus et al.), HOO (Dale and Kilgarriff), SR (Belz, 
White et al.).  The Pilot Attribute Selection for Generating Referring 
Expressions (ASGRE) Challenge took place in 2007 (TUNA); the 
Referring Expression Generation (REG) Challenge in 2008 (TUNA, 
GREC); the first, second and third Generation Challenges umbrella 
events encompassing diverse sets of shared tasks, took place in 2009 
(TUNA, GREC and GIVE), 2010 (QG, GREC and GIVE) and 2011 
(HOO, SR); other shared tasks are being prepared.  More information 
about all of these activities can be found via the links on the 
Generation Challenges 2012 homepage:

http://www.nltg.brighton.ac.uk/research/genchal12.

In order to continue to provide a common forum for these activities, we 
are organising Generation Challenges 2012 (GenChal'12), an umbrella 
event designed to bring together a variety of shared-task evaluation 
efforts that involve the generation of natural language.  For some of 
the tasks, evaluation results and participating systems will be 
presented at the Generation Challenges 2012 Special Session at the 
7TH International Natural Language Generation Conference (INLG'12).  
The session will follow the format of previous GenChal results 
sessions, with presentations of results by the organisers of the different 
shared tasks, as well as presentations of proposals for new shared 
tasks in the Task Proposals Track. As at GenChal'10 and GenChal'11, 
we envisage having a poster session where participants in the various 
shared tasks will have the opportunity to present their approaches and 
results.  In addition, we are planning to have break-out sessions for 
individual tasks, providing further opportunity for current and future 
task participants to exchange ideas and feed back to the organisers.

1. Shared Tasks:

The GenChal'12 meeting will be held at INLG'12 in Starved Rock, IL, 
USA, 30 May-01 June 2012, but the timetables of the individual tasks 
are not completely aligned, and they will be organised independently 
(for details, please refer to the Call for Participation for each task). The 
following is the list of tasks that are running in 2012:

1. Surface Realisation Task 2012: (White, Wanner, Bohnet, Hogan, 
Stent, Belz et al.): Generation of sentences from shallow and deep 
input represenations. Call for Participation in preparation.

2. Helping Our Own (HOO) (Dale): Text-to-text generation task aiming 
to improve the quality of texts, in particular those written by non-native 
speakers.  Call for Registration has been  posted:

http://clt.mq.edu.au/research/projects/hoo/hoo2012/callforregistration.h
tml.

The official HOO results session will be hosted at BEA'12. A summary 
report will be presented at GenChal'12.

3. QG'12 (Rus et al.): Question Generation task aiming to generate 
questions given answers in the form of Natural Language text. 
Although the QG task will not be running in 2012, there will be an 
update report presented at GenChal'12.

2. Track on Proposals for Future Tasks:

We invite submissions of papers describing ideas for future shared 
tasks in the general area of language generation.  Proposed tasks can 
be in the area of core NLG, or in other research areas in which 
language is generated, e.g. text-to-text generation (including MT and 
summarisation), combining core NLG and MT, or combining core NLG 
and text summarisation.  Submissions should describe possible future 
tasks in detail, including information regarding organisers, task 
description, motivating theoretical interest and/or application context, 
size and state of completion of data to be used, and evaluation plans.

3. Instructions for Paper Submissions:

Submissions in the Task Proposals Track should be no more than 4 
(four) pages long excluding citations, and should follow the ACL'12 
guidelines using the style files provided via the ACL 2012 homepage.  
Papers should be sent in PDF format by email to
nlg-stec at itri.brighton.ac.uk.  Task Proposal papers should be 
submitted no later than 10 April 2012.

Submissions will be reviewed by at least 3 members of the Generation 
Challenges Steering Committee (see below).  As reviewing will not be 
blind, there is no need to anonymise papers.  This is not intended to be 
a selective process, but the organisers reserve the right to reject 
papers which do not fall within the scope of the GenChal initiative, or 
which do 
not follow guidelines. 

Accepted submissions will be included in the INLG'12 proceedings, but 
the page limit for camera-ready versions has not yet been finalised (the 
final limit will depend on how many submissions there are).

4. Dates:

Paper submission:  10th April 2012
Notification of acceptance:  15th April 2012
Submission of camera-ready papers:  22nd April 2012
INLG'12:  30 May-01 June 2012

NB: Submission deadlines for the GenChal'12 Shared Tasks differ and 
can be found in the calls for participation for the tasks.

5. Generation Challenges Steering Committee:

Anja Belz, NLTG, University of Brighton, UK
Albert Gatt, University of Malta and University of Aberdeen, UK
Alexander Koller, Saarland University, Germany
Robert Dale, Macquarie University, Australia
Kevin Knight, ISI, University of Southern California, USA
Chris Mellish, University of Aberdeen, UK
Johanna Moore, University of Edinburgh, UK
Amanda Stent, AT&T Labs, USA
Kristina Striegnitz, Union College, USA

6. Organisation:

Anja Belz, NLTG, University of Brighton, UK
Albert Gatt, University of Malta and University of Aberdeen, UK
Alexander Koller, Saarland University, Germany
Kristina Striegnitz, Union College, US

Generation Challenges 2012 homepage: 
http://www.nltg.brighton.ac.uk/research/genchal12

Generation Challenges 2012 email: nlg-stec at itri.brighton.ac.uk 

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics

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