It’s time to start looking forward to the 14th International Conference on Natural Language Generation! The event, taking place 20th-24th September 2021, is an opportunity to hear from experts in the field of NLG from academic and commercial backgrounds.
We’re delighted that Professor Ehud Reiter, Chair in Computing Science at University of Aberdeen and Arria’s Chief Scientist, and Ross Turner, Arria’s Chief Product Officer, will represent us at the event. In addition, Dr. Yaji Sripada, also a Chief Scientist at Arria, is participating at the conference as one of the co-chairs. The event, focusing on academic research, commercial research, and development, is being sponsored by Arria NLG, AX Semantics, ADAPT, Google, and Hugging Face. Due to the ongoing difficulties of COVID-19 and travel restrictions, the event will mainly be virtual, with all presentations of research work hosted online.
This year’s panel features a wealth of commercial expertise:
- Adam Sam (Monok): Adam has been involved in close collaborations with academia, implementing experiments at Harvard, working with researchers at UCLA and The University of Brighton, making use of best practices to commercialize the latest within machine learning.
- Ross Turner (Arria NLG): Ross was a founding member of Arria Data2Text and has held posts at various technology companies such as Nokia and BCG Digital Ventures. Ross brings to market the products and solutions that best serve the needs of Arria’s customers.
- Robert Weißgraeber (Ax Semantics): Robert is the Managing Director and CTO of AX Semantics, where he leads product development and engineering. Robert is also a member of the Forbes Technology Council.
- Michelle Zhou (Juji): Michelle is Co-founder and CEO of Juji, Inc., a California-based company that develops cognitive artificial intelligence assistants in the form of chatbots. She is an expert in human-centered AI.
Invited speakers at the event include Natalie Schluter and Professor Timothy W Bickmore:
As well as being an area chair for INLG 2021, Natalie Schluter is Senior Research Scientist at Google Brain and Associate Professor in NLP and Data Science at the IT University (ITU), in Copenhagen, Denmark. Her primary research interests are in algorithms and experimental methodology for the development of statistical and combinatorial models of natural language understanding and generation.
Dr. Timothy Bickmore is a Professor and Associate Dean for Research in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University in Boston. The focus of his research is on the development and evaluation of embodied conversational agents, virtual and robotic, that emulate face-to-face interactions between health providers and patients.
Finally, as part of the Generation Challenges event within the conference, Professor Ehud Reiter will present a paper, titled ’Generation Challenges: Results of the Accuracy Evaluation of Shared Tasks’, with Craig Thomson. Professor Reiter recently wrote a blog article on this topic, ‘NLG drives consistent narratives’.
We’re excited to hear their presentations!
Although mainly an online event this year, if local restrictions allow, Arria will be hosting small, in-person activities for those attendees who are local to area or are able to safely travel to Aberdeen — click here for details!
You can find out more about INLG 2021 and register for the event here.
