Workshop Call for Participation
WS3 : Coherence in Generated Multimedia

to be held just before the

International Natural Language Generation Conference
INLG-2000

Mitzpe Ramon, Israel

Workshop date: 12 June 2000
Conference dates: 13-16 June 2000
Workshop Home Page

Keywords:

• Generation of multimedia documents/presentations
• Cross-media coreference, deixis, and anaphora
• Media allocation, layout, and synchronization

More and more often, Natural Language Generation is performed as a component of a larger Multimedia Presentation System, whose output consists of language/speech combined with graphics, animation, non-speech audio, etc. Recent years have seen a growing interest in various issues relevant for the design of such systems, such as the issue of multimedia system architecture (e.g., Bordegoni et al. 1997) and media allocation (e.g., ETAI 1997-8). It is gradually becoming clear that a Multimedia Presentation System forces its designers to rethink some fundamental issues, at the core of which is a generalized notion of document coherence, which subsumes the purely linguistic notion of coherence, and which can take different forms depending on the type of document.

This workshop, which is associated with the INLG-2000 conference, invites submission of papers that shed light on the issue of discourse coherence in relation to the generation of documents/ presentations in which natural language + at least one other medium play a nontrivial role. Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

• Document/presentation structure. How can theories of discourse structure (e.g. Rhetorical Structure Theory) be enhanced to cover types of discourse that combine natural language/speech and other media?
• Media allocation. How does the system decide what combination of media is used for expressing a given item of information, and how can authors be allowed to influence such decisions?
• Interlinguality. For example, what types of semantic formalism are most suitable for expressing the meanings of expressions that use different media (e.g., pictures as well as text)?
• `Fusion' of information from different media. For example, how can the referring expressions generated by a Multimedia Presentation System be simplified if the system is able to use pointing?
• Cross-media coreference, deixis, and anaphora. For example, when are expressions like `the method illustrated in figure 5' felicitous, and how can a system be enabled to generate such expressions?
• Media layout (in the case of a written document) and media synchronization (e.g., in the case of a presentation by a life-like agent).
• Corpora. Multimedia corpora are an obvious potential source of information for multimedia generation, but how can connections between different media be captured? (E.g., how should pictures, graphs, or gestures be annotated?)
• System architecture. For example, can the requirements of generating coherent multimedia be reconciled with the advantages of a pipeline architecture (e.g. Reiter 1994, McKeown et al. 1992)?
• Evaluation of the quality (e.g. coherence) of documents or presentations generated by a Multimedia Presentation System.

Presentations containing live demonstrations are welcome, but there is also room for purely theoretical contributions. Each presentation will be followed by a comment from one of the other participants, who will have been enabled to see the final version of the paper beforehand. Submissions format: Submissions (deadline: 31 March) have a preferred length of about 5 double-spaced pages (not counting title page, abstract, and references). See the INLG main conference page (http://www.cs.bgu.ac.il/~nlg2000/) for details about the use of Latex (preferred) or Word. The deadline for camera-ready final versions is 4 May. Authors are asked to indicate explicitly in their submission any special requirements that they may have (e.g. use of VCR, internet access, data projector) beyond an overhead projector.

References

• AIR (1995). Special Issue "Integration of Natural Language and Vision Processing: Intelligent Multimedia". Artif. Intell. Review 9, Nos.2-3.
• Bordegoni et al (1997). Bordegoni, Faconti, Feiner, Maybury, Rist, Ruggieri, Trahanias, and Wilson (1997): A Standard Reference Model for Intelligent Multimedia Presentation Systems. Computer Standards and Interfaces 18, pp.477-496.
• ETAI (1997, 1998). ETAI News Journal on Intelligent User Interfaces, Vol 1, No's 1 and 2. See especially http://www.dfki.de/etai/statements/reiter-nov-97-responses.html.
• Maybury and Wahlster (1998). Readings in Intelligent User Interfaces. Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco.
• McKeown et al. (1992). McKeown, Feiner, Robin, Seligman, Tanenblatt. Generating Cross-references for Multimedia Explanation. In Procs. of Tenth National Conf. on Artif. Intell., p.9-16. Menlo Park.
• Reiter (1994). Has a Consensus NL Generation Architecture Appeared, and is it Psycholinguistically Plausible? In Proc. of 7th Int. Generation Ws. Kennebunkport, Maine.

List of organizers

• Elisabeth Andre (Saarbruecken)
• Phil Cohen (OGI, Oregon)
• John Lee (Co-chair, Edinburgh)
• James Lester (Raleigh, NC)
• Johanna Moore (Edinburgh)
• Jon Oberlander (Edinburgh)
• Ivandre Paraboni (Brighton)
• Ehud Reiter (Aberdeen)
• Thomas Rist (Saarbruecken)
• Laurent Romary (Loria)
• Donia Scott (Brighton)
• Kees van Deemter (Co-chair, Brighton)

Submission Instructions

1. John Lee john@cogsci.ed.ac.uk
2. Kees van Deemter Kees.van.Deemter@itri.brighton.ac.uk

Deadlines

Submissions due by 31 March
Acceptance/rejection notices sent by 21 April
Camera-ready papers due by 4 May