M3G COST Action Training School on Creative Natural Language Generation - call for applications

[Irene Russo]

The Multi3Generation COST Action (www.multi3generation.eu) aims at
promoting interdisciplinary research in Natural Language Generation,
combining computationally-oriented methodology with theories and
insights from the humanities (computational linguistics, psychology,
media studies, philological and literary studies, etc.)

The 2022 Multi3Generation training school on Creative Natural Language
Generation wants to foster interdisciplinary collaborations among
scholars and young researchers, delivering lectures, hands-on
sessions, and keynotes on the state-of-the-art methodologies of
Natural Language Generation and (computational) creativity.

Automatic generation of texts is an essential task in artificial
intelligence and is widely used to produce content shared on the web.
However, evaluation of fluency and grammaticality of automatically
created texts requires feedback provided by humans to improve the
quality of the training data. Collecting judgments is challenging, and
the annotation results' reproducibility is sometimes questioned.
Evaluation of text generated by computationally creative systems poses
further challenges: the output needs to be fluent while ensuring that
the content should also take into account the literature about
(computational) creativity for analysing creative output. Analysing
such creative output relies on the genre of the text and readers'
expectations.

The training school programme will address research questions such as:

- What are the theoretical aspects for evaluating the creativity of
artificially generated text?
- How crucial is the training set for generating plausible instances,
such as for metaphor generation?
- Are theoretical insights from literary studies suitable for
producing better training sets?

The training school is intended for academics at any stage of their
career (with priority given to Early Career Investigators), especially
if working with literary texts and datasets combining texts with images.

The training school will be held at the University Ca' Foscari in
Venice from 19 September to 23 September 2022.

The training school will take place over 5 days, combining theoretical
lessons with hands-on sessions and invited speakers' talks.

Invited speakers: Alexandra Balahur (Joint Research Centre European
Commission), Mario Montenapoleone (University of Salerno), Carlo
Strapparava (FBK), Tony Veale (University College Dublin)
Lecturers: Khalid Alnajjar (University of Helsinki), Federico
Boschetti (CNR-ILC & VeDPH), Mika Hämäläinen (University of Helsinki),
Gianluca Lebani (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice), Monica Monachini
(CNR-ILC & CLARIN-IT), Cristina Mota (INESC-ID Lisboa), Ioannis
Pavlopoulos (Athens University of Economics and Business), Max
Silberztein (Université de Franche-Comté)
Organisers: Irene Russo (CNR-ILC), Federico Boschetti (CNR-ILC &
VeDPH), Max Silberztein (Université de Franche-Comté), Khalid Alnajjar
(University of Helsinki), Mika Hämäläinen (University of Helsinki)

The training school is organised with the support of the Venice Centre
for Digital and Public Humanities, DSU, Ca’ Foscari University of
Venice (https://www.unive.it/pag/39287) and with the support of
CLARIN-IT (https://clarin-it.it).

The application form is available at https://forms.gle/DjGHWsc99ZpkB1yMA

Selected participants will receive a grant to attend the training
school (see the application form for further details).

The deadline for applying is June 30, 2022.

[Irene Russo]