ACL SIGGEN report 2006-2007


SIGGEN is in good health. SIGGEN members have organised a range of meetings, 
with more in the pipeline - the SIGGEN board would particularly like to thank 
all the organisers of these events for their hard work on behalf of the 
community.


Events this year:
-       INLG'06 (Sydney, August 2006 - part of ACL'06)
-       Workshop on Multimodal Output Generation (Aberdeen, January 07)
-       Workshop on Shared Tasks and Comparative Evaluation in NLG (Arlington,
        April 07)
-       ENLG'07 (Schloss Dagstuhl, June 2007 - prior to ACL'07)
        
Future events:
-       Workshop on Using Corpora for NLG: Language Generation and Machine
        Translation (Copenhagen, September 07 - part of MT Summit)
-       INLG'08 (Salt Fork, Ohio, June 2008)


There has been a lot of discussion and engagement in the SIGGEN community over 
the last year, in particular associated with proposals to set up 'shared task' 
evaluations which have become a feature in many other areas of NLP. This has 
resulted in the establishment of the first Shared Task and Evaluation Campaign 
for NLG, organised by Anja Belz (Brighton), Ehud Reiter and Albert Gatt 
(Aberdeen) and Jette Viethen (Macquarie), taking place from May-September 
2007.


Electronic communication has been quite modest. The SIGGEN website has been 
well maintained, but the mailing list has seen fairly low volumes of traffic, 
and the wiki has also not quite taken off yet, although it does have quite a 
lot of useful content. The SIGGEN board aim to improve the SIG's electronic 
profile over coming months, reviewing the role and delivery of the wiki, and 
exploring the establishment of a repository for NLG papers not submittable to 
the main ACL repository.


Elections for three committee posts were held in 2006, resulting in the 
appointment of Michael White, Roger Evans and Jette Viethen (student 
representative). The board thanks the outgoing members (Tilman Becker, Irene 
Langkilde-Geary and David Reiter) for their work on behalf of SIGGEN. The 
board has responded to the ACL request to improve compliance with SIG 
guidelines, and are now fully compliant apart from board and election 
structure - this requires consultation with the membership and possible 
constitutional changes and will be pursued over coming months. A call for 
proposals to host INLG'08 was issued, resulting in a successful bid from 
Michael White and Crystal Nakatsu (Ohio State) and David McDonald (BBN) to 
host in Ohio. Budgets and a contract with the venue have been negotiated. The 
SIGGEN shadow account shows a balance of $928, but figures for INLG'06 have 
not yet been taken into account.



Charles Callaway, Roger Evans, David McDonald, Jette Viethen, Michael White 
SIGGEN board