2013Q3 Reports: SIGGEN
ACL SIGGEN report 2012-2013
SIGGEN continues to be a valued shared resource for an active and
developing community of researchers in natural language generation. In
the past year, we held board elections, supported the organization of
the European Workshop on Natural Language Generation, and maintained
our web presence. We are currently planning for the next edition of
the biennial International Conference on Natural Language Generation
(INLG).
SIGGEN held board elections in late 2012 to replace Sebastian Varges,
Cécile Paris and Margaret Mitchell, whose terms ended on December
31st, 2012. The ballot closed at the end of December 27th 2012. 70
members voted, which is 25% of the SIGGEN mailing list (285
addresses). Barbara Di Eugenio (University of Illinois at Chicago) and
Verena Rieser (Heriot Watt University) were elected as full members
for terms of four years and Shashi Narayan (Université de Lorraine and
Loria) was elected as the student member for a term of two
years. Ielka van der Sluis (Groningen University) and Kristina
Striegnitz (Union College) will continue to serve as board members as
their terms have not ended, yet.
SIGGEN organises the biennial INLG conferences. We are currently
planning for INLG 2014. The number of submissions received by INLG
2012 was somewhat lower than what we had expected. To promote INLG
2014 more effectively, we are exploring organizing INLG 2014 in the
Baltimore area directly before or after ACL 2014. We are also
discussing with SIGdial the possibility of organizing a joint special
session on natural language generation for dialog.
In addition, SIGGEN offers (non-financial) endorsement to workshops
and activities related to language generation. This year we were
pleased to support the 14th European Workshop on Natural Language
Generation (ENLG 2013; http://www.um.edu.mt/events/enlg2013), which is
organized as an ACL workshop taking place on August 8th and 9th in
Sofia, Bulgaria. The organizers are Albert Gatt (University of Malta)
and Horacio Saggion (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona). ENLG
received 35 submissions (23 long, 10 short, 2 demo). 13 long papers
were accepted to be presented orally, 3 long and 7 short papers were
accepted for poster presentation, and 2 demos were accepted for
presentation.
Building on the work of our previous webmaster Margaret Mitchell,
Shashi Narayan has taken over the responsibility of maintaining the
SIGGEN website (http://www.siggen.org).
SIGGEN's financial position continues to be extremely healthy, mainly
because the last two INLG conferences both ended with a
surplus. SIGGEN now has USD 9317 in its sub-account. We are currently
in the process of formulating a financial policy which will reserve a
certain amount for emergencies, such as the INLG conference ending up
in the red, and allow us to spend the rest of the money on fellowships
to students’ participating in INLG and support for other endorsed
events.
Barbara Di Eugenio, Shashi Narayan, Verena Rieser, Kristina Striegnitz
and Ielka van der Sluis
SIGGEN board 10 July 2013