The objective of this summer school is to introduce participants to the concepts and research questions in natural language generation (NLG), summarization and dialogue systems. Although these three areas produce natural language, their distinct communities seldom interact because each community relies on different methods and because the inputs to each kind of system are different. There is, however, considerable overlap in the kinds of problems that need to be considered, from selecting the right content to evaluating the systems. We believe that focusing on the similarities of the different areas can stimulate "cross-pollination" of research. For example, most summarization techniques could benefit from deeper semantic processing as performed in dialogue systems. Similarly, many NLG systems could benefit from techniques used by dialogue systems to substantially improve the generated output.

The summer school will be primarily aimed at PhD students and early career researchers but more experienced will be admitted to the extent that space permits. The early bird registration will be £200 for students and £250 for others until the 15th of May.