2016Q3 Reports: SIGGEN

ACL Special Interest Group on Natural Language Generation (SIGGEN)

Report 2016

Summary

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

Membership

Currently, SIGGEN has around 389 members.

Board

An election was held in December 2014 for three positions on the SIGGEN board. The members elected in 2014 are the following:

• Claire Gardent (CNRS and Lorraine University, Nancy), Chair
• Albert Gatt (University of Malta), Secretary
• Xiao Li (University of Aberdeen, UK), student representative

In addition, there are the following serving members, whose term of elected office started on January 1, 2013:

• Barbara di Eugenio (University of Illinois at Chicago), Treasurer
• Verena Rieser (Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh), Member at large

The next SIGGEN board election is due to take place in December 2016.

Activities

Since the period covered in the last report for 2015, SIGGEN has been responsible for the following events.

International Conference on Natural Language Generation (INLG)

The main activity of SIGGEN is the International Conference on Natural Language Generation, a biennial meeting. The 9th edition of INLG[1] will be held in Edinburgh, UK, on September 5-8, 2016. INLG 2016 is jointly organised by all three universities in Edinburgh, represented by Amy Isard (University of Edinburgh), Dimitra Gkatzia (Edinburgh Napier University) and Verena Rieser (Heriot-Watt University). During the last SIGGEN-endorsed event, the European Workshop on NLG, held in Brighton in 2015, it was decided, based on consultation with conference attendees and SIGGEN members, to extend this year’s event to include a number of workshops and tutorials. Three SIGGEN-endorsed events will be organised in tandem with INLG 2016; these are described in the next section.

The next ENLG is scheduled to take place in 2017. Currently, the SIGGEN board is taking the necessary steps to identify the local organizers and program committee chairs for the next event.