It gives us great pleasure to introduce the technical program of the Sixth International Natural Language Generation Conference (INLG 2010), the biennial meeting of the ACL Special Interest Group in Natural Language Generation (SIGGEN). The INLG conference provides the premier forum for the discussion, dissemination and archiving of research and results in the field of natural language generation. Previous INLG conferences have been held in the USA, Australia, the UK and Israel. Prior to 2000, INLG meetings were held as international workshops with a history stretching back to 1983. In 2010, on behalf of SIGGEN, INLG is being co-hosted by Trinity College Dublin and the Dublin Institute of Technology; and held in Trim Castle Hotel, Trim, Co. Meath, Ireland.
The INLG 2010 programme consists of presentations of substantial, original, and previously unpublished results on all topics related to natural language generation. This year we received 50 submissions (36 full papers and 14 short papers) from 18 different countries from around the world. As in previous years, each submission was reviewed by at least three members of an international programme committee of leading researchers in the field. Based on these reviews 16 submissions were accepted as full papers and 8 as short papers (4 papers were withdrawn). The accepted papers are of the highest quality and cover all of the major aspects of natural language generation.
This year, the conference programme includes two keynote speakers. Susan E. Brennan, Professor of Psychology at Stony Brook University, will speak on "Adapting Generation to Addressees: What Drives Audience Design?" and Richard Power of The Open University will present a talk entitled "Ontologies and Text: Can NLG Bridge the Gap?". This year we are also delighted to host the 2010 Generation Challenges organised by Anja Belz, Albert Gatt and Alexander Koller. This is a part of INLG that has been growing in importance over the last number of conferences and is a great addition to the event.