SIGGEN (NATURAL LANGUAGE GENERATION) Karen Kukich 18 June 1993 MEMBERSHIP SIGGEN membership, which currently stands at 170, is open to any member of the ACL whose dues are paid for the current year. Anyone wishing to become a SIGGEN member may contact David McDonald at siggen AT cs.brandeis.edu or at the postal address below. The SIGGEN mailing/membership list is available to SIGGEN members. SIGGEN BOARD OF DIRECTORS The SIGGEN Board of Directors is in transition. Volunteer nominations were solicited and an election was held in May and June of 93 to replace two members of the SIGGEN committee with one new professional member and one new student member. Karen Kukich and Marie Meteer volunteered to vacate their positions to create new openings. The results of the nominations and voting were as follows: PROFESSIONAL VOLUNTEERS: ----------------------- Michael Elhadad 23 Cecile Paris 21 Koenraad Desmedt 17 GRAD STUDENT VOLUNTEERS: ----------------------- Manfred Stede 25 Nicolas Nicolov 24 Massimo Fasciano 9 Thus, the new SIGGEN Board of Directors will be comprised of the following: David McDonald Johanna Moore Content Technologies University of Pittsburgh 14 Brantwood Road 520 LRDC Arlington, MA 02174-8004 USA Pittsburgh, PA 15260 USA Mcdonald AT cs.brandeis.edu jmoore AT cs.pitt.edu Robert Dale Michael Elhadad University of Edinburgh Dept of Mathematics and Computer Science Centre for Cognitive Science Ben Gurion University of the Negev 2 Buccleuch Place Beer Sheva 84105 Edinburgh EH8 9LW Scotland Israel R.Dale AT edinburgh.ac.uk elhadad AT bengus.BGU.AC.IL Manfred Stede Department of Computer Science University of Toronto Toronto M5S 1A4, Canada mstede AT cs.toronto.edu Board members are meeting at the ACL-93 meeting to plan for the transistion. SIGGEN QUERY BOARD The SIGGEN QueryBoard address will change. During 1993 the QueryBoard served as a forum for a lengthy discussion of SIGGEN's raison d'etre and its role in various activities. SIGGEN has sponsored various workshops and mtgs in the past, but SIGGEN as not itself organized such meetings. Some SIGGEN members feel strongly that SIGGEN itself should NOT organize or govern such mtgs, tho it might help coordinate the scheduling of such mtgs with other ACL functions. Other SIGGEN members have suggested that some SIGGEN committee, perhaps analogous to the AAAI secretariate, be set up, by election, to oversee the organization of such mtgs. These issues will be addressed by the new SIGGEN board members. SIGGEN SPONSORED WORKSHOPS SIGGEN co-sponsored the following workshops during the past year: 1) The Nato Advanced Research Workshop on Burning Issues in Discourse, Maratea, Italy, 13th - 15th April, 1993. A notice was posted to the SIGGEN mailing list that proceedings are available for a fee of 8 US dollars or 5 pounds sterling from: Donia Scott, Information Technology Research Institute, University of Brighton, Brighton Bn1 4AT, England 2) The Fourth European Workshop on Natural Language Generation, Pisa - Italy - April 28-30, 1993. An informal report on this workshop written by Robin Fawcett and Koenraad de Smedt was posted to the SIGGEN mailing list. 3) The ACL Workshop on Intentionality & Discourse Structure, Columbus, Ohio, June 21, 1993. Proceedings will be available from Owen Rambow, rambow AT unagi.cis.upenn.edu. SEVENTH INTERNATIONAL NLG WORKSHOP The International NLG Workshop has been the primary mtg for NLG researchers. The SIGGEN community has been discussing various issues concerning how this and related mtgs might be organized in the future. A committee consisting of McDonald, de Smedt, Fawcett, Hovy, Meteer, and Scott will be making a recommendation soon. NLG BIBLIOGRAHY A new revised version (23rd February 1993) of Robert Dale's NLG bibliography, in compressed PostScript form, is available by anonymous ftp from scott.cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Internet 129.215.144.3). This version includes new material that has appeared within the last year, plus a significant number of additions and corrections provided by members of the NLG community. 13. SIGPHON (COMPUTATIONAL PHONOLOGY) Steven Bird 10 June 93 The purpose of the ACL Special Interest Group in Computational Phonology is to (i) place computational phonology firmly on the research agenda in computational linguistics, (ii) develop links between researchers in computational phonology, and (iii) facilitate the dissemination of research results and software. Current membership stands at 110 people and members generally have an active interest in the field rather than just being onlookers. Members receive a bimonthly newsletter and have access to an FTP directory which houses the membership directory, newsletter back-issues, research papers and software. This year, the SIG proposed and was granted a special issue of _Computational Linguistics_, and 22 papers are currently under review. The SIG has recently been advertised in _Phonology_ and in _Computer Speech and Language_, as we try to build on our membership and promote dialogue between the speech and language communities. For further information, contact: Steven Bird. University of Edinburgh, Centre for Cognitive Science 2 Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh EH8 9LW, Scotland, U.K. Telephone: (031) 650-4421/4432. Fax: (031) 650-4587.