Proceedings of the First Workshop on Multilingual Surface Realisation

Abstract

Natural Language Generation (NLG) is in the ascendant both as a stand-alone (data-to-text or text-totext) task and as part of downstream applications such as abstractive summarization, dialogue-based interaction, question answering, etc. Only in 2017, three "deep" NLG shared tasks that focused on language generation from abstract semantic representations have been organized, although for English only. Surface realization is also a burning issue, in particular, in view of the recent creation of multilingual treebanks annotated with Universal Dependencies (UD). The Multilingual Surface Realization Shared Task (SR '18), whose outcome is presented in these proceedings, targets surface realization from data released for the recent CoNLL shared task on multilingual parsing to UDs. After the First Surface Realization Shared Task in 2011, which focused on English, SR '18 is the second shared task on surface realization and the first to target multilingual input. 21 teams registered for SR '18, and eight of them submitted outputs of their systems.These proceedings include an overview of SR '18 and the description of the eight participating systems, which will be presented at the workshop. We are pleased that for the workshop we could also win Hadar Shemtov, Head of NLG, dialog and summarization groups at Google Research, as invited speaker. We trust that overall the workshop will be a forum for fruitful discussion, and that it will give an impetus to further advances and to further shared tasks in the field.