INTRODUCTION
The 8th European Workshop on Natural Language Generation is part of a bi-annual series of
workshops about natural language generation that runs since 1987 for more than a decade now.
Workshops regularly take place in odd years, alternating with a series of international Workshops
on the same topic. Previous European workshops have been held at Royaumont, Edinburgh,
Judenstein, Pisa, Leiden, Duisburg, and Toulouse. Last year, the international workshop has been
promoted into a conference.
In addition to these regular events, there are occasional and informal meetings on specific topics
in the field. In general, participants appreciated these workshops very much due to the informal
character and the ample opportunity to discuss dedicated topics. Since the former international
workshop on NLG has been promoted into a conference, the NLG community has agreed at the
last European workshop on adopting a different policy than before. The bi-annual international
conferences with formal presentations should be complemented by informal meetings in between
two such conferences. In addition, the NLG community has agreed at the last European workshop
on helding the workshop, which previously has always been a stand-alone event, in connection with
the ACL conference, in the hope of attracting more participants.
Based on these guidelines, the organizing committee intended the workshop to be focused
around some dedicated topics:
a0 Search methods for NLG (in content planning and organization)
a0 Differences in information organization between source and presentation specifications (and
methods to bridge between these)
with a lot of discussions on these topics and some presentations of submitted papers.
Due to the significant submission rate, it turned out that the balance between discussion time
and paper presentations is significantly shifted in favor of the presentations. Hence, it will be one
of the issues in this workshop to assess the pros and cons of this outcome and to discuss appropriate
modes for future European Workshops on Natural Language Generation.
PROGRAM COMMITTEE:
Helmut Horacek, Univ. of the Saarland, Co-chair
Nicolas Nicolov, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Co-chair
Leo Wanner, Univ. of Stuttgart, Co-chair
John Bateman, Univ. of Bremen Richard Kittredge, Univ. of Montreal
Dan Cristea, Univ. of Iasi Chris Mellish, Univ. of Edinburgh
Robert Dale, Macquarie Univ. Sergei Nirenburg, CRL, New Mexico
Laurence Danlos, Universit´e Paris 7 Owen Rambow, AT&T Research
Marc Dymetman, Xerox Research Center Europe Ehud Reiter, Univ. of Aberdeen
Michael Elhadad, Ben-Gurion Univ. Manfred Stede, TU Berlin
Kristiina Jokinen, Univ. of Art and Design Helsinki Michael Zock, LIMSI, CNRS
Helmut Horacek
May 2001
