Final Call for Papers

• Invited Speakers
• Topics
• Submissions
• Important Dates
• REG Challenge 2008
• Program Committee

Invited Speakers

• Kiwako Ito and Shari Speer, The Ohio State University, USA
• Matthew Stone, Rutgers, USA

Topics

INLG invites substantial, original, and unpublished submissions on all topics related to natural language generation. Active topics of interest include:

• Affect/emotion generation
• Architecture of generators
• Content planning
• Discourse models
• Embodied generation
• Evaluation of NLG systems
• Generation and summarization
• Lexicalization
• Multilingual NLG
• Multimedia or multimodal generation
• NLG for real-world applications
• NLG in linguistically motivated frameworks
• Planning and NLG
• Referring expression generation
• Statistical processing for NLG
• Surface realization
• Use of ontologies in NLG

INLG will be held this year immediately prior to ACL:HLT 2008 (June 15–20), in Salt Fork, OH (about 2 hours from Columbus, OH, the site of ACL:HLT 2008). In addition to the INLG conference, there will be a special session for the Referring Expression Generation Challenge 2008 (see below for further details).

Submission Information

Requirements: A paper accepted for presentation at INLG 2008 must not have been presented at any other meeting with publicly available proceedings. Submission to other conferences should be clearly indicated on the paper.

Category of Papers: The conference will be organized as a 2.5 day workshop, including sessions to present long papers, a special session for discussing the Referring Expression Generation Challenge (REG Challenge 2008), and a poster session for short papers and REG Challenge results.

Authors must designate one of these categories at submission time:

• Long papers are most appropriate for presenting substantial research results and must not exceed eight (8) pages, including references;
• Short papers are more appropriate for presenting an ongoing research effort and must not exceed four (4) pages, including references (these will be presented as posters during the poster session).

Paper Submission: Submissions should be uploaded to the EasyChair Web site for the conference. The only accepted format for submitted papers is Adobe PDF. Submissions should follow the two-column format of ACL proceedings. Use of the ACL style files is strongly recommended.

Reviewing will be blind, so you should avoid identifying the authors within the paper.

Note that in extreme cases, an author unable to comply with the above submission procedure should contact the program chairs sufficiently before the submission deadline so alternative arrangements can be made.

Important Dates

Special Session on Referring Expression Generation Challenge 2008

The second Referring Expression Generation Challenge will involve two different data sets: the TUNA Corpus (with previously unseen test data), and the GREC Corpus of references to named entities in free text. The Challenge will have eight submission tracks, including attribute selection, realisation and named entity generation tasks, as well as open category and evaluation methods tracks. Assessment criteria will range from automatically computed metrics to human evaluation. For the TUNA tasks the criteria will include minimality, humanlikeness, and identification/comprehension by human readers; those for the GREC task will include humanlikeness and the DUC criteria of coherence and referential clarity. Subject to feasibility, system processing efficiency is another possible criterion.

Full details on the challenge can be found on the REG Challenge 2008 Web site. A separate call for participation will be issued by the challenge organizers, Anja Belz and Albert Gatt ().

Program Committee

• Regina Barzilay, MIT, USA
• John Bateman, Universität Bremen, Germany
• Anja Belz, University of Brighton, UK
• Kalina Bontcheva, University of Sheffield, UK
• Stephan Busemann, DFKI, Germany
• Charles Callaway, University of Edinburgh, UK
• Giuseppe Carenini, University of British Columbia, Canada
• Nathalie Colineau, CSIRO, Australia
• Robert Dale, University of Macquarie, Australia
• Hercules Dalianis, Stockholm University, Sweden
• Laurence Danlos, Université Paris 7, France
• Barbara Di Eugenio, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA
• Philip Edmonds, Sharp Laboratories of Europe, UK
• Noemie Elhadad, Columbia University, USA
• Roger Evans, University of Brighton, UK
• Claire Gardent, CNRS/LORIA, France
• Michel Généreux, LIPN, France
• Nancy Green, University of North Carolina Greensboro, USA
• Markus Guhe, University of Edinburgh, UK
• John Kelleher, Dublin Insitute of Technology, Ireland
• Ivana Kruijff-Korbayova, Universität des Saarlandes, Germany
• James Lester, North Carolina State University, US
• Chris Mellish, University of Aberdeen, UK
• Jon Oberlander, University of Edinburgh, UK
• Stephan Oepen, University of Oslo, Norway
• Cecile Paris, CSIRO ICT Centre, Australia
• Paul Piwek, The Open University, UK
• Rashmi Prasad, University of Pennsylvania, USA
• David Reitter, University of Edinburgh, UK
• Graeme Ritchie, University of Aberdeen, UK
• James Shaw, The Thomson Corporation, USA
• Amanda Stent, Stony Brook University, USA
• Matthew Stone, Rutgers, USA
• Mariet Theune, University of Twente, The Netherlands
• Takenobu Tokunaga, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan
• Kees van Deemter, University of Aberdeen, UK
• Ielka van der Sluis, University of Aberdeen, UK
• Sebastian Varges, University of Trento, Italy
• Sandra Williams, The Open University, UK
• Michael Zock, CNRS/LIF, France

Organizing Committee

Michael White and Crystal Nakatsu.
Department of Linguistics, The Ohio State University.

David McDonald.
BBN Technologies

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