Learning to write for the ‘robot writers’
The leading international conference on Natural Language Generation (INLG) comes to Spain for the first time, under the close attention of the main companies in the field.
Delegations from technology giants such as Microsoft, eBay and IBM and more than 100 experts from 20 countries and four different continents (America, Africa, Asia, and Europe): the growing interest in Natural Language Generation — a cutting-edge Artificial Intelligence technique, better known as ‘NLG’ by its English acronym — will bring industry and researchers from around the world to Santiago de Compostela between September 4 and 7. Considered the world’s first conference in the field, the event has gained even greater relevance following its most recent edition, by absorbing the main European meeting in the sector – the ‘ENLG’ symposium, which will be integrated into future editions of ‘INLG’. On this occasion, the event is organized by CiTIUS, which with this new meeting promoted by the Intelligent Systems Group puts the finishing touch on a summer of first-rate scientific events, including two summer schools in Artificial Intelligence and the International Congress Euro-Par 2017 – a European benchmark in parallel and distributed computing.
From activity reports to “robot journalists”
If talking about Artificial Intelligence often evokes the image of an autonomous ‘robot’, the techniques used in the field of NLG confirm machines’ ability to carry out in a ‘non-supervised’ way various tasks traditionally reserved for a human expert. Thus, the generation of grammatically correct texts from numeric-symbolic data (tables and charts not always easy to understand) is already a reality, in many cases indistinguishable to the reader from texts written by a specialist. High social-impact domains, such as meteorology or the automatic generation of news for the press, already have technology fully operational.
One of the main challenges currently at the scientific level is managing the large amount of data generated daily; INLG2017 will serve as a meeting point to present the latest advances in an area especially attractive to companies, since it is an emerging market that moves millions of euros worldwide.
Among the notable attendees at the conference will be Professor Ehud Reiter, Chair of Computational Linguistics at the University of Aberdeen (Scotland) and a pioneer in NLG; Reiter is also the founder of one of the leading companies in the field: the company ARRIA NLG, one of the sponsors of this edition together with the email marketing company Phrasee and the multinational consultancy Accenture.
In addition, the conference will also feature two invited speakers: Frank Schilder, from Thomson Reuters; and Gemma Boleda (Pompeu Fabra University), a new researcher in the Ramón y Cajal program who already has a promising CV (more than 900 citations accumulated for her scientific work), and who has just been awarded one of the prestigious ERC Starting Grants to consolidate her research by the European Research Council.
Among the other attendees it is also worth highlighting researcher Claire Gardent, president of 'SIGGEN' (the interest group that sponsors the conference) and a member of the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, by its French acronym), as well as the CiTIUS postdoctoral researcher Alejandro Ramos, recognized for his GALiWeather work with various national and international awards, among which stands out the 2017 Research Award of the Scientific Computer Society of Spain (SCIE) - BBVA Foundation.
Delegations from technology giants such as Microsoft, eBay and IBM and more than 100 experts from 20 countries and four different continents (America, Africa, Asia, and Europe): the growing interest in Natural Language Generation — a cutting-edge Artificial Intelligence technique, better known as ‘NLG’ by its English acronym — will bring industry and researchers from around the world to Santiago de Compostela between September 4 and 7. Considered the world’s first conference in the field, the event has gained even greater relevance following its most recent edition, by absorbing the main European meeting in the sector – the ‘ENLG’ symposium, which will be integrated into future editions of ‘INLG’. On this occasion, the event is organized by CiTIUS, which with this new meeting promoted by the Intelligent Systems Group puts the finishing touch on a summer of first-rate scientific events, including two summer schools in Artificial Intelligence and the International Congress Euro-Par 2017 – a European benchmark in parallel and distributed computing.
From activity reports to “robot journalists”
If talking about Artificial Intelligence often evokes the image of an autonomous ‘robot’, the techniques used in the field of NLG confirm machines’ ability to carry out in a ‘non-supervised’ way various tasks traditionally reserved for a human expert. Thus, the generation of grammatically correct texts from numeric-symbolic data (tables and charts not always easy to understand) is already a reality, in many cases indistinguishable to the reader from texts written by a specialist. High social-impact domains, such as meteorology or the automatic generation of news for the press, already have technology fully operational.
One of the main challenges currently at the scientific level is managing the large amount of data generated daily; INLG2017 will serve as a meeting point to present the latest advances in an area especially attractive to companies, since it is an emerging market that moves millions of euros worldwide.
Among the notable attendees at the conference will be Professor Ehud Reiter, Chair of Computational Linguistics at the University of Aberdeen (Scotland) and a pioneer in NLG; Reiter is also the founder of one of the leading companies in the field: the company ARRIA NLG, one of the sponsors of this edition together with the email marketing company Phrasee and the multinational consultancy Accenture.
In addition, the conference will also feature two invited speakers: Frank Schilder, from Thomson Reuters; and Gemma Boleda (Pompeu Fabra University), a new researcher in the Ramón y Cajal program who already has a promising CV (more than 900 citations accumulated for her scientific work), and who has just been awarded one of the prestigious ERC Starting Grants to consolidate her research by the European Research Council.
Among the other attendees it is also worth highlighting researcher Claire Gardent, president of 'SIGGEN' (the interest group that sponsors the conference) and a member of the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, by its French acronym), as well as the CiTIUS postdoctoral researcher Alejandro Ramos, recognized for his GALiWeather work with various national and international awards, among which stands out the 2017 Research Award of the Scientific Computer Society of Spain (SCIE) - BBVA Foundation.