As the goal of the workshop is to bring together researchers from two communities so that they can discover common tasks and goals, we aim for a format that encourages discussion and discovery of research topics and open issues relevant to both research areas.

We therefore invite short position papers (2–4 pages and up to one additional page for references) from researchers working on human–robot interaction and/or natural language generation. Papers should introduce finished or ongoing research efforts, placing a particular emphasis on the open problems and challenges that they face at the intersection of HRI and NLG. Papers can also describe promising applications for NLG in HRI, research avenues where HRI and NLG researchers should join forces, or tools, methods, representations from one field that should be of considerable interest to – but are most likely unknown in – the other field.

Accepted papers will be made available to other workshop participants through the workshop website, but will not be formally published. We therefore encourage a wide range of submission, including descriptions of previously published work, work in progress, proposals for novel research directions, surveys, and any other content relevant to the topic of the workshop. We will aim to produce a journal paper after the workshop in order to reach wider audiences by emphasising the open challenges, issues, and the possible solutions for NLG for HRI. The position-paper authors and other participants will be invited to co-author the journal paper in the months following the workshop.

Topics

Contributions to the workshop are sought in all areas relevant to the goal of the workshop including, but not limited to:

  • Natural Language Generation for Interaction
  • Situated Natural Language Generation
  • HRI research that makes use of NLG techniques
  • NLG research that targets interactive language use
  • NLG tools and resouces that could be valuable specifically for HRI
  • Dynamic, uncertain representations of context/environment for NLG
  • Generation beyond template-based approaches
  • Generation under uncertainty
  • Generation in dynamic environments
  • NLG from the HRI perspective
  • Challenges and Tasks for NLG for HRI
  • Referring Expressions Generation for Spatial Scenes

Important dates

  • September 14, 2018: Submission deadline for position papers
  • October 15, 2018: Notification of acceptance
  • October 29, 2018: Camera-ready due
  • November 6–7, 2018: INLG main conference ✔︎
  • November 8, 2018: Workshop on NLG for HRI ✔︎

Instructions for authors

Submissions should follow the new ACL Author Guidelines and policies for submission, review and citation, but need not be anonymized for the review. Please use the ACL 2018 LaTeX style files or Microsoft Word template.

Please submit your position papers in PDF format via the EasyChair submission site at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=nlghri2018