We are pleased to introduce the technical programme of the Fourth International Natural Language Generation Conference (INLG), the Biennial Meeting of SIGGEN, the ACL Special Interest Group in Natural Language Generation. INLG is the leading international conference on research into natural language generation. It has been held at Brockenhurst (UK) in 2004, in Harriman (New York, USA) in 2002, and in Mitzpe Ramon (Israel) in 2000. Prior to 2000, the INLG meetings were International Workshops, running every other year since 1980. The INLG conference provides a forum for the discussion, dissemination and archiving of research topics and results in the field of text generation. This year, INLG is being held as a COLING/ACL 2006 workshop. It takes place on the weekend prior to the main COLING/ACL 2006 conference, on July 15-16th 2006, in Sydney, Australia.
The INLG programme consists of substantial, original, and previously unpublished results on all topics related to natural language generation. This year, as in previous years, each submission was reviewed as a full paper by at least three members of an international programme committee of leading researchers in the field, listed on the next page. We received 38 submissions (both long and short papers) from all over the world, from which we accepted 11 long papers (including two student papers) and five short papers. We would like to thank all who submitted papers and our programme committee for their hard work.
This year, the programme centers around a variety of research issues around the realisation component of a natural language system, including the use of statistical techniques. In particular, there are a substantial number of contributions on the generation of referring expressions. The programme also includes an invited talk by Professor Kathleen McKeown (Columbia University, New York, USA) entitled "Lessons Learned from Large Scale Evaluation from Systems that Produce Text: Nightmares and Pleasant Surprises" and a special session on "Sharing Data and Comparative Evaluation", organised by Dr Anja Belz (University of Brighton, UK) and Professor Robert Dale (Macquarie University, Australia).