5-7 August 1998
Prince of Wales Hotel
Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, Canada
CALL FOR PAPERS
(For more information, visit http://logos.uwaterloo.ca/~inlg98 )
The 9th biennial Workshop on Natural Language Generation will be held
in the scenic town of Niagara-on-the-Lake, near Niagara Falls, in
Ontario, Canada, on 5-7 August 1998.
The INLG workshop is the principal gathering for researchers in natural
language generation, providing a pleasant atmosphere for stimulating
and informative talks on all aspects of the topic. The workshop
attracts a healthy mixture of researchers from both universities and
research institutes, graduate students, and visitors from related
fields such as machine translation, multimedia presentation planning,
and parsing. About 65 people are expected to attend the workshop,
which traditionally has had a very diverse international
representation.
The town of Niagara-on-the-Lake is in the heart of one of Canada's
major fruit-growing and wine regions, and is 30 minutes' drive from
Niagara Falls. It is one of the oldest settlements in Canada, with
many fine examples of Victorian architecture. Niagara-on-the-Lake
bills itself as the prettiest town in Canada, and many would agree: its
main streets are quaint and picturesque, with many interesting shops,
cafes, and restaurants. It is also the home of the Shaw Festival, one
of the top North American repertory theatre companies.
The workshop is sponsored by the Association for Computational
Linguistics and ACL SIGGEN (Special Interest Group on Natural Language
Generation).
The workshop is in the week immediately prior to the joint conference
of COLING and ACL, in Montreal, Canada (10-14 August 1998). After the
workshop, a bus will take participants who wish to attend COLING / ACL
directly to the Toronto train station, for an express train to Montreal
(approximately 4 hours).
TOPICS OF INTEREST
Of interest are papers on all topics relating to the automated
production of natural language, including but not limited to: discourse
structure; grammar; lexis and lexical choice; text planning and schemas
(macroplanning); sentence planning (microplanning); semantics and
knowledge representation; register, genre, and pragmatics; generator
architecture; realization; generator applications; system descriptions;
generator evaluation; planning of text formatting; generation in
multimedia planning and presentation systems; speech synthesis.
Also welcomed are demonstrations of generation systems, or modules of
systems, running either via the Web or on a Sun computer to be provided
at the workshop.
REQUIREMENTS FOR SUBMISSION
Papers should describe unique work not published before. They should
emphasize the creative and interesting aspects of the work, but should
also describe empirical validation and testing as much as possible.
Papers that are being submitted to other conferences must state this
fact on the first page.
FORMAT FOR SUBMISSION
Theoretical papers must not exceed 10 pages, including title,
references, figures, etc. Please use no smaller than 11pt font, with
margins of 1 inch / 2.5 cm all around. Papers not satisfying the
specified length and formatting requirements will be rejected without
review.
System demonstrations will be reviewed as well. Please send an
outline, clearly marked as a system demonstration in the heading, that
describes the demonstration, including if possible screen shots.
Outlines may not exceed 4 pages, all included, using font no smaller
than 11pt and margins of 1 in / 2.5 cm all around. Outlines not
satisfying the specified length and formatting requirements will be
rejected without review.
ELECTRONIC SUBMISSION
Electronic submissions should be in the form of a PostScript file.
This file should be sent to hovy@isi.edu, with the subject field "INLG
submission".
SUBMISSION IN HARD COPY
Hardcopy submission is possible too. Five copies of the paper or
demonstration outline should be sent to:
Eduard Hovy, INLG-98
Information Sciences Institute
4676 Admiralty Way
Marina del Rey, CA 90292-6695
U.S.A.
DEADLINES
Electronic submissions must be received by 28 January 1998, so that
they can be printed and checked for completeness. Electronic
submissions will be accepted only if they can be printed at ISI.
Hardcopy submissions must be received by 1 February 1998. Late papers
will be returned unreviewed.
Notification of receipt will be e-mailed to the first author (or
designated author) soon after receipt. Authors will be notified of
acceptance before 10 March 1998. Camera-ready copies of final papers
prepared in a format to be specified, preferably using a laser printer,
must be received by 15 June 1998, along with a signed copyright release
statement.
WORKSHOP ORGANIZERS
The workshop is being organized by Chrysanne DiMarco of the University
of Waterloo, with the assistance of Graeme Hirst of the University of
Toronto. The Program Chair is Eduard Hovy of USC/ISI.
General workshop questions:
Chrysanne DiMarco, cdimarco@logos.uwaterloo.ca, phone +1 519 888 4443
General paper-submission questions:
Eduard Hovy, hovy@isi.edu, phone +1 310 822 1510 x731
PROGRAM COMMITTEE
Eduard Hovy, USC/ISI, Marina del Rey (chair)
Stephan Busemann, DFKI, Saarbruecken
Susan Haller, University of Wisconsin-Parkside
Helmut Horacek, University of the Saarland
Xiaorong Huang, Formal Systems, Toronto
Kristiina Jokinen, ATR, Kyoto
Guy Lapalme, University of Montreal
Elisabeth Maier, DFKI, Saarbruecken
Chris Mellish, University of Edinburgh
Marie Meteer, BBN
Jon Oberlander, University of Edinburgh
Cecile Paris, CSIRO, Sydney
Owen Rambow, CoGenTex Inc., Ithaca
Ehud Reiter, University of Aberdeen
Elke Teich, Macquarie University, Sydney
Marilyn Walker, AT&T Labs Research, Florham Park
For more information, visit the INLG-98 Website:
http://logos.uwaterloo.ca/~inlg98