ACL/EACL 2001 Workshop
8th EUROPEAN WORKSHOP ON NATURAL LANGUAGE GENERATION
6-7 July 2001
Toulouse, France
http://www.cs.unca.edu/~bruce/acl01/NLG.html
endorsed by SIGGEN
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Natural language generation (NLG) constitutes the production of meaningful
texts in natural languages from some underlying non-linguistic
representation of information. Accomplishing this goal may be envisioned
for a number of different purposes, including standardized and/or
multi-lingual reports, summaries, machine translation, dialog applications,
and embedding in multi-media and hypertext environments. Consequently, the
automated production of language is associated with a large number of
highly diverse tasks whose appropriate orchestration in high quality poses
a variety of theoretical and practical problems. Relevant issues include
content selection, text organization, the production of referring
expressions, aggregation, lexicalization, and surface realization, as well
as coordination with other media.
This workshop is part of a bi-annual series of workshops about natural
language generation that runs since 1987. Previous European workshops have
been held at Royaumont, Edinburgh, Judenstein, Pisa, Leiden, Duisburg, and
Toulouse. The goal of the workshop is to be an informal meeting which
facilitates the dissemination of knowledge and expertise in the field. The
workshop will focus on the following topics:
* Search methods for NLG (in content planning and realization)
There seems to be a substantial discrepancy between
application-oriented systems and principled approaches to NLG.
Accomodating a standard pipeline architecture with suitable heuristic
preferences to the intended functionality of a system stands in
contrast to several principled approaches to searching which have been
tried out so far. These include blackboard architectures, constraint
propagation and, more recently genetic algorithms and statistical
techniques. A comparison of these methods in terms of their potential
and limitations is likely to improve understanding about this issue.
Gained insights could prove fruitful for building applications in a
more general and, thus, better reusable way, especially in large-scale
applications such as summarization and machine translation.
* Differences in information organization between source and
presentation specifications (and methods to bridge between these)
Whether the generation task is to verbally express contents of some
knowledge base or to produce multi-lingual presentations from
language-neutral or similar representations, there are strong
similarities in building the target representations: In the
overwhelming number of cases, the ordering and embedding of elements
in the source representation is reflected by the ordering and
embedding of their corresponding realizations at the surface. Often,
this reflection is systematic, many times even simple. But a few cases
prove complex and involve a major restructuring of the surface
structure when compared to the source structure. A major emphasis of
this topic is on collecting such complex cases, identifying
commonalities between them and discussing restructuring techniques.
Accepted papers on these topics will be scheduled for presentation. The
majority of the time will be devoted to discussions, either in sequence or
in parallel, depending on the number of participants. We are considering
organizing a panel. For the focus topics above, we will contact a number of
competent researchers to address the topic from a specific perspective
according to their experience. In addition, we will ask some of them to
prepare material / concrete examples for discussions.
WORKSHOP CHAIRS
Helmut Horacek Univ. of the Saarland
Nicolas Nicolov IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
Leo Wanner Univ. of Stuttgart
PROGRAMME COMMITTEE
John Bateman Univ. of Bremen
Dan Cristea Univ. of Iasi
Robert Dale Macquarie University
Laurence Danlos Universite Paris 7
Marc Dymetman Xerox Research Centre Europe, Grenoble
Michael Elhadad Ben-Gurion Univ.
Kristiina Jokinen Univ. of Art and Design Helsinki
Richard Kittredge Univ. of Montreal & CoGenTex
Daniel Marcu ISI, Univ. of Southern California
Chris Mellish Univ. of Edinburgh
Sergei Nirenburg CRL, New Mexico
Owen Rambow AT&T Research
Ehud Reiter Univ. of Aberdeen
Manfred Stede Technical University of Berlin
Michael Zock LIMSI, CNRS
SUBMISSIONS
Papers describing original work in the area of NLG in particular related to
the workshop focus topics above should be submitted electronically. Papers
should be 6-8 pages long in PDF format. We recommend a A4, two-column
format like the ACL proceedings: http://acl2001.dfki.de/style/
We also invite poster submissions (free format, up to 6 page, PDF).
The submissions should be associated with a cover email containing the
following information (ASCII text):
# TITLE: <title of the paper>
# AUTHORS: <list of authors>
# EMAIL: <email of author(s) for correspondence>
# KEYWORDS: <keywords, topic sub-areas, ...>
# ABSTRACT: <abstract of the paper>
Send your submission to Leo Wanner <wannerlo@informatik.uni-stuttgart.de>.
IMPORTANT DATES
Paper submissions *** 6 April 2001 ***
Notification of acceptance 27 April 2001
Camera-ready copies due 16 May 2001
Registration deadline as ACL
Workshop dates 6-7 July 2001
REGISTRATION
The registration fee for the workshop will be posted at a later stage. The
registration fee includes attendance of the workshop and a copy of workshop
proceedings. Follow the registration instructions at the ACL site and
indicate that you would like to attend the NLG workshop.
People wishing to attend the workshop but not submitting papers should send
a notification of attendance: a 1-2 page stating interest to participate,
work done in NLG so far, and potential contributions / material for
discussions about one of the topics. This informationn will help with the
organisation of discussions and allow for an informal and highly
interactive character of the workshop. Notifications of attendance should
be sent to Helmut Horacek <horacek@cs.uni-sb.de>.
MORE INFORMATION
Check the following web site for updates about the NLG workshop:
http://www.cs.unca.edu/~bruce/acl01/NLG.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Mar 29 2001 - 09:07:44 MET DST