International Natural Language Generation Conference
                              INLG'2000

                         Mitzpe Ramon, Israel

                       Workshops: 12 June 2000
                   Main conference: 13-16 June 2000


                             Call For Papers

The First International Natural Language Generation Conference (INLG'2000)
will be held June 13 to 16, 2000 in Mitzpe Ramon, Israel. This conference
continues in the tradition of the nine biennial workshops on natural
language generation that have been held from 1980 to 1998. INLG'2000 will
offer the opportunity to a larger audience to participate in the main
meeting of researchers in the field. For the general sessions, substantial,
original, and unpublished contributions to natural language generation are
solicited. A separate track will be offered for Student Papers. Submissions
for all tracks are due by 6 February 2000. The INLG'2000 program committee
invites papers describing original research on the following topics:

   * Generation and summarization
   * Multimodal and multimedia generation
   * Multilingual generation
   * Concept to speech, models of intonation
   * Strategic generation for text and dialogue
   * Text planning, discourse models, argumentation strategies, content
     selection and organization
   * Tactical generation, formalisms and models of grammar, sentence
     aggregation, lexical choice
   * Architecture of generators
   * Knowledge acquisition and resources for generation and summarization
   * User-customized generation and summarization
   * Psychological modelling of discourse production
   * Learning methods for generation
   * Evaluation methodologies for generation and summarization
   * Applications of: generation, concept-to-speech, information extraction,
     information retrieval techniques to summarization, report generation,
     explanation.

The conference will be organized in four tracks:

  1. Main session
  2. Student session
  3. Workshops
  4. Special session on evaluation in generation

We plan to hold all presentations in the plenary hall with no parallel
tracks. The special session on evaluation will be held the day before the
main session, on Monday 12 June 2000. A paper accepted for presentation at
INLG'2000 must not be or have been presented at any other meeting with
publicly available proceedings. Submission to other conferences should be
indicated on the paper. Submission to the main session should describe
completed work. Submission to the student session should describe work in
progress. Submission to the evaluation session should describe statements on
methodology, reports on actual evaluation work and proposals for evaluation
benchmarks.
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Dates

   * 6 February 2000: Papers submission deadline
   * 14 April 2000: Notification of acceptance
   * 7 May 2000: Final copy due for all contributions
   * 12 June 2000: Special Session on Evaluation in NLG, Mitzpe Ramon
   * 13-16 June: INLG'2000 Conference, Mitzpe Ramon

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Submission Instructions

http://www.cs.bgu.ac.il/~nlg2000/submission.html
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Programme Committee

   * Michael Elhadad, Ben Gurion University, Israel (Chair)
   * Stephan Buseman, DFKI, Germany
   * Graeme Hirst, University of Toronto, Canada
   * James Lester, North Carolina State University, USA
   * Inderjeet Mani, The MITRE Corporation, USA
   * Kathy McCoy, University of Delaware, USA
   * David McDonald, Gensym Corp, USA
   * Dragomir Radev, University of Michigan, USA
   * Jacques Robin, Federal University of Pernambuco, Brazil
   * Donia Scott, University of Brighton, UK
   * Manfred Stede, Technical University, Berlin, Germany
   * Matthew Stone, Rutgers University, USA
   * Ingrid Zukerman, Monash University, Australia

Student Session

   * Irene Langkilde, University of South California - ISI
   * Charles Brendan Callaway, North Carolina State University
   * James Shaw, Columbia University


Call For Workshops Proposals

The Organizing Committee invites proposals for workshops. To be considered,
please submit a formal proposal to the address shown below by January 1,
2000. Decisions will be made by January 8, 2000.
http://www.cs.bgu.ac.il/~nlg2000/cfw.html  
Dragomir R. Radev http://www.si.umich.edu/~radev

Special Session on Evaluation

For additional information, please contact:

   * Inderjeet Mani, The MITRE Corporation

Software Demo

Proposals for software or project demonstrations are invited. Proposals
should indicate the type of hardware that would be required if the proposal
is accepted.

Equipment Availability

Presenters will have available an overhead projector, a slide projector, a
data projector (Barco) which will display from laptops, and a VHS (PAL)
videocassette recorder. NTSC format may be available; if you anticipate
needing NTSC, please note this information in your proposal. Requests for
other presentation equipment will be considered by the local organizers;
requests for special equipment should be directed to the local organizers no
later than May 15, 2000.
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Local Arrangements

   * Michael Elhadad elhadad@cs.bgu.ac.il
   * Yael Dahan Netzer yaeln@cs.bgu.ac.il

Dept. of Computer Science
Ben Gurion University
P.O.Box 643 
Beer Sheva 84105
Israel