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| A workshop to be held at the German Annual Conference on AI, KI-99, in Bonn, Germany, September 13-15, 1999 |
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| A Workshop of the Special Interest Group 1.3.1 on Natural Language Systems of the Gesellschaft für Informatik e.V. |
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Natural language generation (NLG) technology is currently finding its way into commercial systems. Promising applications are the automatic generation of weather forecasts, information about measurement data, or various kinds of authoring systems that help an author in composing a text.
Generally the techniques used in NLG applications and application-oriented NLG systems differ from those utilized in research systems. While the latter typically aim at general solutions, the former are geared towards solving particular classes of NLG problems. This involves dealing with canned texts or templates rather than with free choice from the coverage of complex linguistic grammars. Correspondingly, different systems encode linguistic knowledge at different levels of detail and sophistication.
While many theoretical linguistical concepts are difficult to use in practice, the techniques used in application systems often lack theoretical foundation. Their linguistic inadequacy severely restricts the transportability of systems to other tasks and domains. Current work in NLG addresses this problem, e.g. the RAGS project.
Whatever the chosen approach, its adequacy depends on the expected input to, and the desired output of, the NLG system. Input may vary from non-linguistic data to surface-semantic sentence representations. Further generation parameters may be available, such as a user model or a discourse model. Output may vary from a single sentence per context to multiple alternatives that allow (require) the user to choose from.
This workshop aims at exploring the tension between more general and more specific approaches to NLG, thereby clarifying what NLG technology is suited best for which task. We want to discuss how different demands on the input to a NLG system relate to different variability in the output. Furthermore, the kind of input that is available from applications using NLG modules and the expectations on such applications will be a topic of interest. Thus, the workshop will be an excellent opportunity to get an overview over existing state-of-the-art technology and its optimal usage. The workshop will be relevant for both developers and users of NLG systems. Exploring conditions for successful NLG applications is a step that should be taken jointly by technology providers and current and potential users of NLG software.
We solicitate contributions by researchers and developers working in the field of NLG as well as by current and potential appliers of NLG software. Contributions should belong to one of the following categories:
Participants are invited to prepare short (15 minutes) or long (30 minutes) presentations, by submitting a two or four page abstract, respectively. Submissions should be in the Springer LNCS-Format. Electronic submission of PostScript files is strongly preferred. Abstracts submitted electronically will be made available in advance so that participants can prepare for fruitful discussions following the presentations.
Submissions may be made in German or English; since we expect a number of international participants, all presentations should be given in English.
Submissions must reach the organizers by May 15, 1999. Notification of contributors will be given at the end of May. Accepted contributions will be published in a volume complementing the proceedings of the KI-99 conference.
Note: The participation in the workshop requires the registration for one of the supporting conferences, i.e. KI-99 or DAGM '99.
Following a short introduction (max. 30 minutes), we are planning for three sets of presentations. Short presentations take 15 minutes, and long presentation 30 minutes, each including a short question period. After each set, a longer discussion period (up to 60 minutes) should allow for a comparison of all contributions. The topics for the sets are first a presentation of single systems and their properties, for the second set, general contributions comparing multiple systems and finally the interface between external applications and NLG modules (expectations by the application vs. demands of the NLG modules).
The expected total time depends on the number of contributions, we hope for a two day workshop.
Dr. Tilman Becker and Dr. Stephan Busemann
DFKI GmbH
Stuhlsatzenhausweg 3
66123 Saarbrücken
(+49) 681-302-5271 and -5286 (phone)
(+49) 681-302-5341 and -5338 (fax)
becker@dfki.de and busemann@dfki.de