IdoDagan: New page: ACL SIGGEN report 2008-2009 SIGGEN continues to be a valued shared resource for an active and developing community of researchers in natural language generation. Over the past year we hav...

2009-07-09T11:43:44Z

New page: ACL SIGGEN report 2008-2009 SIGGEN continues to be a valued shared resource for an active and developing community of researchers in natural language generation. Over the past year we hav...

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ACL SIGGEN report 2008-2009

SIGGEN continues to be a valued shared resource for an active and developing
community of researchers in natural language generation. Over the past year we
have achieved full compliance with ACL SIG requirements, held elections for
the board, updated our online presence, given endorsement to three related
workshops (with three more in the pipeline), and agreed a host for the next
INLG conference, in Ireland in 2010.

SIGGEN is now fully compliant with ACL SIG requirements, including (slightly
reluctantly) the assignment of officer roles (chair, secretary, treasurer,
webmaster) to various board members. The new arrangements were fully confirmed
in an election to the board at the end of 2008 - the next election is due at
the end of 2010. We would like to thank the outgoing board members, Charles
Callaway, David McDonald, Jette Viethen for their hard work on behalf of the
generation community, and welcome our new members, Cecile Paris,
Christian Pietsch and Sebastian Varges who join Roger Evans and Mike White on
the SIGGEN board.

SIGGEN organises the biennial INLG conferences, and this year was a rest year
after the very successful INLG 2008 at Salt Fork, Ohio, USA. Following an open
bidding process in early 2009, we were delighted to award organisation of INLG
2010 to Ielka van der Sluis (Trinity College, Dublin), John Kelleher and Brian
McNamee (Dublin Institute of Technology). INLG 2010 will be held in Trim,
County Meath, Ireland, 7-9 July 2010. In addition, SIGGEN offers
(non-financial) endorsement to workshops and activities related to generation,
and this year we were pleased to support the Third Workshop on Constraints in
Discourse (Potsdam, August 2008), a Workshop on the Question Generation Task
and Evaluation Challenge (Arlington, September 2008) and the 12th European
Workshop on Natural Language Generation (ENLG'09) (Athens, April 2009).
Support for three further workshops in July and August 2009 (UCNLG+Sum, GIVE-2
and PRE-Cogsci 2009)is also already agreed, so we look forward to a busy year
for the NLG community.

In January 2009, Christian Pietsch took over the role of SIGGEN webmaster, and
gave our online presence a much needed review. As well as a general tidy-up of
the main pages, Christian undertook to transfer the SIGGEN wiki site,
previously hosted at Edinburgh by David Reitter, into the main ACL wiki
(http://aclweb.org/aclwiki/index.php?title=Natural_Language_Generation_Portal),
and to re-establish clear email addresses for contacting the SIGGEN board
through the main ACL mail server (siggen-board@aclweb.org etc.). We continue
to explore effective ways to support communication and access to resources for
the generation community.

SIGGEN's financial position is healthy. We last reported our account balance
(as a subaccount of the ACL account) in 2007 as $928 (all figures in US
dollars). We have since confirmed that INLG 2006 did not alter this balance
(as it ran as an ACL workshop, hence the risk and any surpus were assumed by
the main conference), and can now report that INLG 2008 made a surplus of
$2943, so that our current balance stands at $3871. Such a reserve is useful
to underwrite risk in free-standing events, and to allow for the possibility
of subsidising attendance to the INLG conference.

Roger Evans, Cecile Paris, Christian Pietsch, Sebastian Varges, Mike White
SIGGEN board
2 July 2009

2009Q3 Reports: SIGGEN - Revision history

IdoDagan: New page: ACL SIGGEN report 2008-2009 SIGGEN continues to be a valued shared resource for an active and developing community of researchers in natural language generation. Over the past year we hav...