============================= 9th International Workshop on NATURAL LANGUAGE GENERATION 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