Confs.: EACL NGL Workshop Budapest

[Johanna Laakso]

(Moderator's note: The EACL people have very actively posted numerous calls
to their conference. As I do not believe that many URA-LIST readers will be
interested in these questions, I have "censored" some of them, trusting that
anybody interested will find the necessary information by following the
links posted earlier and here below.)

>From steven.krauwer at elsnet.org


                           Call for Papers


          9th EUROPEAN WORKSHOP ON NATURAL LANGUAGE GENERATION
                     (in conjunction with EACL2003)

                          13-14 April 2003
                          Budapest, Hungary

           (http://www.ags.uni-sb.de/~horacek/EACL-EWNLG03.html)


Natural language generation (NLG) is a subfield of natural language
processing that focuses on the generation of written texts in English
or other human languages, generally from some non-linguistic data or
knowledge. 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 biennial series of workshops about natural
language generation that has been running 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.
A substantial amount of time will be devoted to discussions, either in
sequence or in parallel, depending on the number of participants. The
workshop will focus on the following topics:

- Formal semantics and NLG
  In several subareas of NLG (generation of referring expressions,
  lexicalization, among others) methods of formal semantics have
  already been used successfully. By focusing on this topic, we hope
  to strengthen the theoretical basis of NLG, complementing the
  application-oriented emphasis that has become dominant recently.

- Evaluation of NLG systems
  Evaluation is an important factor for all NL systems, which is
  notoriously underrepresented in the generation field. By focusing on
  this topic, we hope to strengthen the empirical basis of NLG,
  preparing the ground for dedicated activities on this topic.

We are considering organizing an invited talk on the first and a panel
on the second topic. Substantial and original submissions on all
subfields of NLG, especially on the two special topics, are welcome.
Accepted papers will be scheduled for presentation. Since this is a
workshop, we encourage papers that describe speculative ideas, work in
progress, and discussions of important issues.


WORKSHOP CHAIRS

Ehud Reiter, Univ. of Aberdeen
Helmut Horacek, Univ. of the Saarland
Kees van Deemter, Univ. of Brighton


PROGRAMME COMMITTEE

John Bateman, Univ. of Bremen, Germany
Nadjet Bouayad-Agha, Univ. Pompeu Fabra, Spain
Stephan Busemann, DFKI, Germany
Jo Calder, Fourth Person LtD, UK
Charles Callaway, IRST, Italy
John Carroll, Univ. of Sussex, UK
Robert Dale, Macquarie University, Australia
Claire Gardent, CNRS Nancy, France
Pamela Jordan, Univ. of Pittsburgh, USA
Rodger Kibble, Univ. of London, UK
Emiel Krahmer, Univ. of Tilburg, The Netherlands
Chris Mellish, Univ. of Edinburgh, UK
Owen Rambow, Columbia Univ., USA
Leo Wanner, Univ. of Stuttgart, Germany


SUBMISSIONS

Papers describing original work in all areas of NLG, in particular
related to the workshop focus topics above, should be submitted
electronically. Papers should be 4-8 pages long in PDF format following
the guidelines at the EACL site
(http://ufal.ms.mff.cuni.cz/~hajic/eacl03/submission.html).
Send your submission to Ehud Reiter (ereiter at csd.abdn.ac.uk).


IMPORTANT DATES

Paper submissions:              7 January 2003
Notification of acceptance:    28 January 2003
Camera-ready copies due:       13 February 2003
Registration deadline:         as ACL
Workshop dates:             13-14 April 2003


REGISTRATION

The registration fees include attendance of the workshop and a copy of
workshop proceedings. Follow the registration instructions at the EACL
site (http://www.conferences.hu/EACL03) and indicate that you would
like to attend the NLG workshop.


PARTICIPATION WITHOUT SUBMISSION

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 information
will help with the organisation of discussions and allow for an
informal and highly interactive workshop.


CONTACT INFO

Notifications of attendance should be sent to Ehud Reiter
(ereiter at csd.abdn.ac.uk).


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