SIGGEN (Owen Rambow)

Owen Rambow, rambow AT cs.columbia.edu
 
SIGGEN report 2003

CONFERENCES AND WORKSHOPS: The major NLG event of the year was INLG-02, which
SIGGEN sponsored and supported.  It was held in Columbia University's Arden
House, near New York City, just before ACL (which took place in Philadelphia).
While submissions were as in previous years (with, as in previous years, an
acceptance rate of about 50%), attendance was below expectations (about 75
paying attendants, down from the record 100 at the workshop in 1998, with the
first conference in Israel in 2000 having a lower attendance, presumably due to
the location).  An attempt to extend the audience by having special paper
tracks on both dialog and summarization were not successful, perhaps due to
lack of sufficient publicity outside of the standard NLG communities, and/or
lack of NLG-related work in these areas outside of the NLG community (which
would submit anyway).  A further factor for low attendance may have been the
co-location with ACL, from which it was separated by the July 4 holiday.

It was decided that INLG04 will be organized by a group at the University of
Brighton and take place near Southampton, England.

There has been a request by Susan Haller to co-sponsor a special track on user
modeling and HCI approaches in natural language generation at FLAIRS.

MAILING LIST AND WEB SITE: The web site needs to be updated.Helmut Horacek and
Tilman Becker have jointly taken over this task.

ELECTION: A contested election was held for new board members. Tilman Becker
(Saarbrücken) and Marilyn Walker (Sheffield) replaced Maria Milosavljevic and
Ehud Reiter as permanent board members, and Stephen Wan (Sydney) replaced
NoŽmie Elhadad as student member.