2014Q3 Reports: SIGGEN

ACL SIGGEN report 2013-2014 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 supported a number of workshops and initiatives and maintained and developed our web presence. We are about to have 8th International Conference on Natural Language Generation, INLG 2014.

The SIGGEN board has not changed this past year. However, three current board members are reaching the end of their term, so that we will be preparing for elections in the fall.

SIGGEN organises the biennial INLG conferences, and INLG 2014 (http://inlg2014.wordpress.com/) is organized by Margaret Mitchell (MS), David McDonald (SIFT), Kathleen McCoy (UDelaware) (General Chairs) Aoife Cahill (ETS), Verena Rieser (Sponsorship Chair). INLG 2014 will be held in Philadelphia, PA, USA, from 19. June – 21. June immediately preceding ACL 2014 and will be co-located with the annual meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL) and The Young Researchers’ Roundtable on Spoken Dialog Systems.

This year INLG received 35 submissions (20 full papers, 12 short papers and 3 demo proposals) from 12 different countries from around the world. 10 submissions were accepted as full papers (8 presented orally, 2 as posters), 16 as short papers (4 presented orally, and 12 as posters), and 3 demos. In addition there will be two keynote addresses by Marilyn Walker (UCSC) and Chris Callison-Burch (UPenn). We were glad to see that the submission numbers improved in comparison to INLG 2012 (by 30%), which indicates that our decision to organize INLG in proximity to ACL and to co-locate with SIGdial is working as intended to increase interest in INLG.

SIGGEN explored new initiatives on “generation for interactive systems” together with SIGdial. For example, we organised a successful shared session between INLG’14 and SIGdial’14 with 10 papers submitted to the shared session (2 demos, 3 short, 5 long). Of these, 2 long papers and 1 short paper were accepted for the joint session by the INLG programme committee. This year participants also have the option to jointly register for both conferences. Furthermore, we are exploring the possibility of a shared challenge in this area together with SIGdial president Amanda Stent.

In addition, SIGGEN offers (non-financial) endorsement to workshops and activities related to language generation. We are looking forward to supporting the 14th European Workshop on Natural Language Generation in 2015.

To further SIGGEN’s visibility the SIGGEN website has been well-maintained in 2013 and 2014 due to the efforts of our webmaster Shashi Narayan.

SIGGEN's financial position was extremely healthy. Prior to INLG-2014, SIGGEN had USD 9317 in its sub-account. At the point of writing the final budget for INLG 2014 is not known yet, but we are confident that we will play at least even, especially as INLG'14 has obtained several sponsors due to a very successful campaign totalling $5k of sponsorship income: ARRIA, Microsoft, Amazon and ETS. ARRIA has successfully applied for platinum sponsorship for INLG for the next 4 years.

Kristina Striegnitz, Barbara Di Eugenio, Verena Rieser, Shashi Narayan and Ielka van der Sluis SIGGEN board 1 June 2014