2021Q3 Reports: SIGGEN

ACL Special Interest Group on Natural Language Generation (SIGGEN): 2020 Report

Summary

SIGGEN is the Special Interest group on Natural Language Generation, the study of systems and methods to generate text or speech from both non-linguistic and linguistic input.

Membership

Currently, SIGGEN has around 450 members.

Board

The current SIGGEN board, elected in December 2020, is:

Ehud Reiter (Aberdeen University, UK), Chair (term expires in 2022)
Jose M. Alonso (University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain), Member (term expires in 2022)
Emiel van Miltenburg (Tilburg University, The Netherlands), Treasurer (term expires in 2024)
Raquel Hervás (Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain), Secretary (term expires in 2024)
Miruna-Adriana Clinciu (Edinburgh Centre of Robotics, UK), student representative (term expires in 2022)

The next SIGGEN board election is due to take place in December 2022, and new board members will be elected to replace Reiter, Alonso, and Clinciu.

Activities

Since the period covered in the last report for 2020, SIGGEN has been responsible for the following events.

INLG 2020

The 13th INLG conference was held in Dublin, Ireland, on 15-18 December 2020 (https://www.inlg2020.org/). This was a fully online event, due to COVID restrictions.

INLG 2020 included several workshops in addition to the main conference:

1st Workshop on Discourse Theories for Text Planning
2nd Workshop on Interactive Natural Language Technology for Explainable Artificial Intelligence (NL4XAI)
2nd Workshop on Natural Language Generation for Human-Robot Interaction (NLG4HRI)
1st Workshop on Evaluating NLG Evaluation
3rd Workshop on Natural Language Generation from the Semantic Web

Other Events

SIGGEN also endorsed and supported the following events:

1st Intelligent Information Processing and Natural Language Generation workshop (IntelLang 2020), held at ECAI 2020
3rd Workshop on Multilingual Surface Realisation (MSR 2020), held at COLING 2020
SIGGEN webinar series

Upcoming events

INLG-2021 will happen in Aberdeen, UK, on 20-24 September 2021. Because of the Covid situation and likely restrictions on travel, INLG-2021 will primarily take place online. It is chaired by Anya Belz (University of Brighton), Angela Fan (Facebook), Ehud Reiter (University of Aberdeen), and Yaji Sripada (University of Aberdeen).

SIGGEN is also sponsoring and supporting the GEM Workshop at ACL 2021. It will be held online.

In addition, the SIGGEN webinar series will continue through 2021.

Website

We have created a YouTube channel to publish the SIGGEN webinar series videos (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEjwaouzGWy6Oktstkxzc3A).