8th EUROPEAN WORKSHOP ON NATURAL LANGUAGE GENERATION

6-7 July 2001
Toulouse, France

Sponsored by IBM


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:

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 BatemanUniv. of Bremen
Dan CristeaUniv. of Iasi
Robert DaleMacquarie University
Laurence DanlosUniversite Paris 7
Marc DymetmanXerox Research Centre Europe, Grenoble
Michael ElhadadBen-Gurion Univ.
Kristiina JokinenUniv. of Art and Design Helsinki
Richard KittredgeUniv. of Montreal & CoGenTex
Chris MellishUniv. of Edinburgh
Sergei NirenburgCRL, New Mexico
Owen RambowAT&T Research
Ehud ReiterUniv. of Aberdeen
Manfred StedeTechnical University of Berlin
Michael ZockLIMSI, 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. A good LaTeX style to use is eaclap.sty.gz One can combine it with the acl.bst BibTeX bibliography style. An MS-Word document template is also available.

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 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).


Updated   2001/02/20.   Revisit this site for updated information.