2026Q3 Reports: SIGGEN
ACL Special Interest Group on Natural Language Generation (SIGGEN): 2025 Report
Summary
SIGGEN is the Special Interest group on Natural Language Generation. This special interest group focuses on the study of systems and methods to generate text or speech from both non-linguistic and linguistic input. The group has been active over the past 30+ years researching all aspects with respect to the generation of language.
Membership
Currently, SIGGEN has around 469 members as determined by our mailing list.
Board
The current SIGGEN board, elected in December 2024, is the following:
- Chenghua Lin (University of Manchester, UK), Chair (term expires in 2026)
- Saad Mahamood (Shopware AG, Germany), Secretary (term expires in 2028)
- Simon Mille (Dublin City University, Ireland), Treasurer (term expires in 2028)
- David Howcroft (Aberdeen University, Scotland, UK), Member (term expires in 2026)
- Patrícia Schmidtová (Charles University, Czechia), Student representative (term expires in 2026)
The next SIGGEN board election is due to take place in December 2026, and new board members will be elected to replace Chenghua Lin, David Howcroft, and Patrícia Schmidtová.
Activities
Since the period covered in the last report, SIGGEN has been responsible for the following events.
INLG 2025
The 18th INLG was an in-person conference (with the possibility of hybrid attendance for non-presenters) held in Hanoi, Vietnam (https://2025.inlgmeeting.org). The conference took place before EMNLP 2025 which was organised for the week after in Suzhou, China.
As stated in the INLG 2025 proceedings, we had for the main conference the following number of submissions:
"The INLG conference is the main international forum for the presentation and discussion of research on Natural Language Generation (NLG). This year, we received 127 conference submissions (including 5 from ARR) and 8 demo paper submissions. After a peer review process, 38 long papers, 12 short papers, and 4 demo papers were accepted to the conference and are included in these proceedings."
In addition to the papers submitted to the main conference, there were also 4 papers in the Generation Challenges (GenChal) track.
Other Events
SIGGEN also supported the following workshops and tutorials at the conference:
- Large Language Models in Social Science: Methods, Applications, and Ethics [Tutorial]
- LLM Reasoning on Medicine: Challenges, Opportunities, and Future [Workshop]
- The 1st Workshop for Young Researchers in Natural Language Generation [Workshop]
- The 3rd International Workshop of AI Werewolf and Dialog System [Workshop]
- The 11th International Workshop on Vietnamese Language and Speech Processing [Workshop]
Upcoming events
INLG 2026 will take place in Utrecht, the Netherlands between the 29th of October to the 2nd of November (https://2026.inlgmeeting.org). This year the conference will take place before EMNLP 2026 which is organised to take place shortly after in Hungary.
SIGGEN also organised in 2026 a special symposium on a retrospective of Evaluation in Natural Language Generation (RetroEval 2026). This symposium was organised to celebrate the career contributions of Prof. Ehud Reiter.
Website
The website continues to be hosted at: https://inlgmeeting.org.
Mailing List
SIGGEN maintains an active mailing list located at: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/SIGGEN