Subject: Reminder:  CFP: Special Issue of Computational Linguistics on
Date: Wed, 15 Jan 1997 07:32:47 +1100
From: Robert Dale <rdale@mpce.mq.edu.au>
To: salt@cstr.ed.ac.uk, elsnet-list@cogsci.ed.ac.uk

NL Generation

Apologies if you see this more than once.
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                      Call for Submissions
        Special Issue of Computational Linguistics on
                  Natural Language Generation

Guest Editors: Robert Dale, Barbara Di Eugenio, Donia Scott

The automatic generation of natural language texts is an important
aspect of most natural language applications, e.g.: systems aimed at
achieving interactive dialogue, report or instruction generation, and
machine translation.  However, Natural Language Generation (NLG) has
for a long time been overshadowed by the study of natural language
understanding, encompassing tasks such as parsing and interpretation.
By all ways of measuring, NLG has received less attention: fewer
conferences, fewer dissertations and books, considerably less space in
textbooks, and less funding from research councils and industry.

Over the past few years, though, the situation has been
changing. First, NLG has formed an identity as a separate field of
research; second, the emergence of new application areas --- such as
automatic content creation for multimedia (e.g. WWW and speech);
multilingual information provision, including support tools for
technical authors and translators; and the generation of instructional
texts --- has led to the transfer of theoretical work into systems of
use outside of laboratory settings.  The state of the art in NLG is
now such that researchers can start replicating each other's results
and building on each other's work.

The goal of this special issue of Computational Linguistics on Natural
Language Generation is to bring together a collection of papers that
will attest to the progress of the field and disseminate it to a wider
audience.  We expect the papers in the Special Issue to address a
broad spectrum of issues in NLG, including discourse planning;
sentence planning; linguistic realisation; the development of lexical
and grammatical resources for generation systems; multilingual
generation; multimodal generation; and evaluation issues.  The editors
welcome submission of papers on any topic in NLG.  Papers which
describe fully implemented systems should place such description
within a wider context and pay attention to theoretical issues.

The deadline for submission of manuscripts is February 1st, 1997.  

For hard copy submission: Six double-spaced hard copies should be
submitted, clearly marked as submissions to the Special Issue on
Natural Language Generation, to arrive on or before the deadline, to
the following address:

Julia Hirschberg, Editor
Computational Linguistics
2C-409
AT&T Labs -- Research
600 Mountain Avenue
Murray Hill NJ 07974
USA

email: acl@research.att.com
tel: +1 908-582-7496
fax: +1 908-582-7550

Manuscripts may be submitted electronically; instructions are currently
available by anonymous ftp: 

ftp://ftp.cs.columbia.edu/acl-l/Styfiles/CLstyle/submission-instructs.Z.

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