[ NB: the message you just received on the same subject contained the general CfP rather than the one for this workshop -- we apologize! ] Call for Papers 9th EUROPEAN WORKSHOP ON NATURAL LANGUAGE GENERATION (in conjunction with EACL2003) 13-14 April 2003 Budapest, Hungary (http://www.ags.uni-sb.de/~horacek/EACL-EWNLG03.html) Natural language generation (NLG) is a subfield of natural language processing that focuses on the generation of written texts in English or other human languages, generally from some non-linguistic data or knowledge. 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 biennial series of workshops about natural language generation that has been running 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. A substantial amount of time will be devoted to discussions, either in sequence or in parallel, depending on the number of participants. The workshop will focus on the following topics: - Formal semantics and NLG In several subareas of NLG (generation of referring expressions, lexicalization, among others) methods of formal semantics have already been used successfully. By focusing on this topic, we hope to strengthen the theoretical basis of NLG, complementing the application-oriented emphasis that has become dominant recently. - Evaluation of NLG systems Evaluation is an important factor for all NL systems, which is notoriously underrepresented in the generation field. By focusing on this topic, we hope to strengthen the empirical basis of NLG, preparing the ground for dedicated activities on this topic. We are considering organizing an invited talk on the first and a panel on the second topic. Substantial and original submissions on all subfields of NLG, especially on the two special topics, are welcome. Accepted papers will be scheduled for presentation. Since this is a workshop, we encourage papers that describe speculative ideas, work in progress, and discussions of important issues. WORKSHOP CHAIRS Ehud Reiter, Univ. of Aberdeen Helmut Horacek, Univ. of the Saarland Kees van Deemter, Univ. of Brighton PROGRAMME COMMITTEE John Bateman, Univ. of Bremen, Germany Nadjet Bouayad-Agha, Univ. Pompeu Fabra, Spain Stephan Busemann, DFKI, Germany Jo Calder, Fourth Person LtD, UK Charles Callaway, IRST, Italy John Carroll, Univ. of Sussex, UK Robert Dale, Macquarie University, Australia Claire Gardent, CNRS Nancy, France Pamela Jordan, Univ. of Pittsburgh, USA Rodger Kibble, Univ. of London, UK Emiel Krahmer, Univ. of Tilburg, The Netherlands Chris Mellish, Univ. of Edinburgh, UK Owen Rambow, Columbia Univ., USA Leo Wanner, Univ. of Stuttgart, Germany SUBMISSIONS Papers describing original work in all areas of NLG, in particular related to the workshop focus topics above, should be submitted electronically. Papers should be 4-8 pages long in PDF format following the guidelines at the EACL site (http://ufal.ms.mff.cuni.cz/~hajic/eacl03/submission.html). Send your submission to Ehud Reiter (ereiter@csd.abdn.ac.uk). IMPORTANT DATES Paper submissions: 7 January 2003 Notification of acceptance: 28 January 2003 Camera-ready copies due: 13 February 2003 Registration deadline: as ACL Workshop dates: 13-14 April 2003 REGISTRATION The registration fees include attendance of the workshop and a copy of workshop proceedings. Follow the registration instructions at the EACL site (http://www.conferences.hu/EACL03) and indicate that you would like to attend the NLG workshop. PARTICIPATION WITHOUT SUBMISSION 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 information will help with the organisation of discussions and allow for an informal and highly interactive workshop. CONTACT INFO Notifications of attendance should be sent to Ehud Reiter (ereiter@csd.abdn.ac.uk).