Invited Speakers

INLG 2020  is proud to welcome the following invited speakers

Claire Gardent is a senior research scientist at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). She has previously worked on syntactic, semantic and discourse parsing, on question answering, on dialog and on computer assisted language learning. Recently,  she has mostly been working on natural language generation. In 2017, she launched the WebNLG challenge, a shared task where the goal is to generate text from DBPedia data. She has proposed neural models for  simplification and summarisation; generation for  multi-document input, long form question answering;  multilingual generation from Abstract Meaning Representations and  response generation for dialog. She currently heads the AI XNLG Chair on multi-lingual, multi-source NLG and the CNRS LIFT Research Network on Computational, Formal and Field Linguistics. 

Lucia Specia is Professor of Natural Language Processing at Imperial College London. Her research focuses on various aspects of data-driven approaches to natural language processing, with a particular interest in multimodal and multilingual context models and work at the intersection of language and vision. Her work has various applications such as machine translation, image captioning, quality estimation and text adaptation. She currently holds an ERC (European Research Council) Starting Grant on Multi-modal Context Modelling for Machine Translation. She has also  part-time professorial roles the University of Sheffield and the ADAPT Centre, Dublin City University

Michael White is a Professor in the Department of Linguistics at The Ohio State University.  His research has focused on NLG in dialogue with an emphasis on surface realization, extending also to paraphrasing for ambiguity avoidance and data augmentation in the context of Ohio State's virtual patient dialogue system.  He co-organized the NSF Workshop on Shared Tasks in NLG which provided a crucial impetus for the initial shared tasks in NLG, and he was a co-organizer of the first surface realization shared task.  Since 2018, Dr. White has been collaborating with conversational AI researchers at Facebook, where he is currently a Visiting Research Scientist.