Sponsored by the Association for Computational Linguistics with support from the American Association for Artificial Intelligence

The 9th biennial Workshop on Natural Language Generation was held in the scenic town of Niagara-on-the-Lake, near Niagara Falls, in Ontario, Canada, on 5-7 August 1998. Over 95 registrants from around the world attended; there were 34 presentations, all of which were fully refereed by the program committee.

The printed proceedings of the workshop are now available for US$25 (including postage) from the Association for Computational Linguistics. Orders charged to a credit card (Visa or MasterCard) may be placed by e-mail to acl@aclweb.org; mail orders should be sent to:

Association for Computational Linguistics
P.O. Box 6090
Somerset, NJ 08875, USA

In addition, many individual papers are available directly from their authors by following the links in the workshop program below.

Workshop schedule

Tuesday 4 August 1998
18:00	Reception
19:30	Dinner

Wednesday 5 August 1998
7:00	Breakfast buffet
8:30	Opening, announcements, Chrysanne DiMarco, Eduard Hovy
Session 1: Planning and generation with multiple media
8:45	``Natural Language Generation Journeys to Interactive 3D Worlds'', James Lester, William Bares, Charles Callaway, and Stuart Towns (North Carolina State U, Raleigh, NC, USA)
9:30	``Communicative goal-driven NL generation and data-driven graphics generation: An architectural synthesis for multimedia page generation'', John Bateman, Thomas Kamps, Joerg Kleinz, Klaus Reichenberger (U of Stirling, Scotland / Darmstadt U, Germany)
10:00	``A principled representation of attributive descriptions for generating integrated text and information graphics descriptions'', Nancy Green, Giuseppe Carenini, Johanna Moore (U of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh)
10:30	Coffee break
Session 2: Architectural questions
11:00	``An architecture for opportunistic text generation'', Chris Mellish, Mick O'Donnell, Jon Oberlander, Alistair Knott (U of Edinburgh, Scotland)
11:30	``Controlled realization of complex objects by reversing the output of a parser'', David McDonald (Gensym Corp, Boston, USA)
12:00	``De-constraining text generation'', Stephen Beale, Sergei Nirenburg, Evelyne Viegas, Leo Wanner (CRL, New Mexico State U, USA)
12:30	Lunch
Session 3: Joint planning of content and formulation
14:00	``Automatic generation of subway directions: Salience gradation as a factor for determining message and form'', Lidia Fraczak, Guy Lapalme, Michael Zock (LIMSI-CNRS, Orsay, France / U Montreal, Canada)
14:30	``Introducing maximal variation in text planning for small domains'', Erwin Marsi (U of Nijmegen, The Netherlands)
14:45	``A new approach to expert system explanations'', Regina Barzilay, Daryl McCullough, Owen Rambow, Jonathan DeCristofaro, Tanya Korelsky, and Benoit Lavoie (CoGenTex Inc., Ithaca NY, USA)
15:00	``Macroplanning with a cognitive architecture for the adaptive explanation of proofs'', Armin Fiedler (U Saarland, Germany)
15:15	Discussion
15:30	Coffee break
16:00	Buses leave for outing to Niagara Falls and dinner at Skylon Tower
22:30	Return from outing

Thursday 6 August 1998
7:00	Breakfast buffet
Session 4: Sentence planning I: Inference and content
9:00	``Experiments using stochastic search for text planning'', Chris Mellish, Alistair Knott, Jon Oberlander, Mick O'Donnell (U of Edinburgh, Scotland)
9:30	``Abductive reasoning for syntactic realization'', Ralf Klabunde, Martin Jansche (U of Heidelberg, Germany / Ohio State U, Columbus, USA)
10:00	``Generating warning instructions by planning accidents and injuries'', Daniel Ansari and Graeme Hirst (U of Toronto, Canada)
10:30	Coffee break
Session 5: Sentence planning II: Subtasks
11:00	``Discourse marker choice in sentence planning'', Brigitte Grote, Manfred Stede (U Magdeburg, Germany / TU Berlin, Germany)
11:30	``Clause aggregation using linguistics knowledge'', James Shaw (Columbia U, New York, USA)
11:45	``Attention during argument generation and presentation'', Ingrid Zukerman, Richard McConachy, Kevin Korb (Monash U, Melbourne, Australia)
12:00	``Planning dialogue contributions with new information'', Kristiina Jokinen, Hideki Tanaka, Akio Yokoo (ATR Research Lab, Kyoto, Japan)
12:15	Discussion
12:30	Lunch
Session 6: Relationships between semantics, syntax, lexis, and morphology
14:00	``Generation of noun compounds in Hebrew: Can syntactic knowledge be fully encapsulated?'', Yael Dahan Netzer, Michael Elhadad (Ben Gurion U, Israel)
14:30	``Textual economy through close coupling of syntax and semantics'', Matthew Stone, Bonnie Webber (U of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA)
14:45	``A computational architecture for mapping interlingua representations to feature structures'', Murat Temizsoy, Ilyas Cicekli (Bilkent U, Ankara, Turkey)
15:00	``Toward multilingual protocol generation for spontaneous speech dialogues'', Jan Alexandersson, Peter Poller (DFKI, Saarbrücken, Germany)
15:15	Discussion
15:30	Coffee break
System demonstrations (two sessions, in parallel)
16:00	``FLAUBERT: User-friendly multilingual NLG'', Fréderic Meunier, Laurence Danlos (TALANA UFR Linguistique, Paris, France)
	``ROMVOX: Text-to-speech synthesis of Romanian'', Attila Ferencz, Teodora Ratiu, Maria Ferencz, Tünde-Csilla Kovacs, István Nagy, Diana Zaiu (Technical University and Software ITC, Cluj-Napoca, Romania)
16:20	``GoalGetter: Generation of spoken soccer reports'', Mariët Theune, Esther Klabbers (IPO, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands)
	``MultiMeteo: Interactive weather report generation'', José Coch (ERLI, Charenton-le-Pont, France)
16:40	``GBGen: Large-scale domain-independent GB syntax'', Thierry Etchegoyhen, Thomas Wehrle (LATL and FPSE, University of Geneva, Switzerland)
	``MLWFA: Multilingual weather forecasts'', Tianfang Yao, Dongmo Zhang, Qian Wang (Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China)
17:00	``Amalia: NLG with abstract machine for typed feature structures'', Evgeniy Gabrilovich, Nissim Francez, Shuly Wintner (Technion, Haifa, Israel and University of Tübingen, Germany)
	``Circsum-Tutor: Content planning in a tutoring system'', Reva Freedman, Stefan Brandle, Michael Glass, Jung Hee Kim, Yujian Zhou, Martha Evens (University of Pittsburgh and Illinois Institute of Technology, USA)
17:20	``WYSIWYM: Knowledge editing with NL feedback'', Richard Power, Donia Scott (ITRI, University of Brighton, England)
17:40	Free time
19:00	Dinner

Friday 7 August 1998
7:00	Breakfast buffet
Session 7: Realization: Deep and shallow grammars
9:00	``Fully lexicalized head-driven syntactic generation'', Tilman Becker (DFKI, Saarbrücken, Germany)
9:15	``Approaches to surface realization with HPSG'', Graham Wilcock (U of Manchester, England)
9:30	``The Multex generator and its environment: Application and development'', Christian Matthiessen, Licheng Zeng, Marilyn Cross, Ichiro Kobayashi, Kazuhiro Teruya, Canzhong Wu (Macquarie U, Sydney, Australia)
9:45	``A flexible shallow approach to text generation'', Stephan Busemann and Helmut Horacek (DFKI, Saarbrücken, Germany)
10:00	``The practical value of n-grams in generation'', Irene Langkilde and Kevin Knight (USC/ISI, Marina del Rey, USA)
10:15	Discussion
10:30	Coffee break
Session 8: Constructing the input
11:00	``Generation as a solution to its own problem'', Donia Scott, Richard Power, Roger Evans (ITRI, Brighton, England)
11:15	``EXEMPLARS: A practical, extensible framework for dynamic text generation'', Michael White and Ted Caldwell (CoGenTex Inc., Ithaca NY, USA)
11:30	Discussion
11:45	Panel: ``Reference Architectures for Language Generators'', Eduard Hovy (moderator), Stephan Busemann, Robert Dale, Chris Mellish, Donia Scott
12:30	Lunch
14:15	Bus to Toronto and Montreal train

Program Committee

• Eduard Hovy, USC/ISI, Marina del Rey (chair)
• Stephan Busemann, DFKI, Saarbrücken
• 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, Saarbrücken
• Daniel Marcu, USC/ISI, Marina del Rey
• Chris Mellish, University of Edinburgh
• Marie Meteer, BBN
• Jon Oberlander, University of Edinburgh
• Cécile 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

Local Organizers

• Chrysanne DiMarco, University of Waterloo
• Graeme Hirst, University of Toronto

Last updated: 09 September 1998 by Graeme Hirst.
Problems and comments to gh@cs.toronto.edu