Claire Gardent Senior Researcher CNRS/LORIA, Nancy, France Bio --- I am a tenured Senior Researcher at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). Before that, I did a Master in Essex, a PhD in Edinburgh and postdocs at the Universities of Utrecht, Clermont-Ferrand, Amsterdam and Saarbrücken. I have worked on the automatic acquisition of lexical resources for French, on syntactic parsing, on semantic role labelling and on the interaction between virtual worlds and natural language processing. My main topic of interest however is natural language generation. I worked on reversible models back in the 80's during my PhD and on discourse generation when in Amsterdam. Since arriving in Nancy, I've worked on surface realisation using Feature-Based Tree Adjoining Grammars; on using NLG to automatically generate grammar exercises for language learners; on developing error mining techniques to improve generation systems; and on developing NLG based NL interfaces to Knowledge Bases. Currently, I am working with several postdocs and PhD students on developing hybrid (statistical/symbolic) grammar based approaches to generation from linked data and from knowledge bases. I have served as Chair of the European Chapter for the Association of Computational Linguistics (EACL), editor in chief of the journals "Traitement Automatique des Langues" and "Language and Linguistic Compass (Computational and Mathematical Section)" and member of the editorial board of the journals "Computational Linguistics", "Journal of Semantics", "Journal of Linguistic Modelling". With Eva Banik, Eric Kow and Vinay Chaudry, I have recently co-organised the KBGen shared task, a task to compare and evaluate generators on KB data. In 2011, I organised and co-chaired ENLG in Nancy. Joint Statement with Albert Gatt --------------------------------- One recent evolution that is particularly relevant for the NLG community is the proliferation of readily available symbolic data such as linked data and large scale open source knowledge bases. There is also a large body of work on text-to-text processing (including summarisation, sentence and text simplification, sentence compression) which raises interesting issues for NLG. If elected, we will strive to promote the development of an NLG community working around those themes e.g., by supporting the organisation of shared tasks (which could focus on all or some subparts of the NLG process) or by inviting people from the semantic web and from the text-to-text processing communities to participate in the SIGGEN conferences (via tutorials, invited talks, demos, workshops, etc). To strengthen the ENLG/INLG conferences, we will encourage participation by a larger audience e.g., by extending these conferences with workshops and tutorials and by liaising with existing structures/projects lying at the interface between NLG and other fields such as for instance, the iV&L European COST action of Vision and Language and more cognitively oriented fields such as in particular, computational narratology. We are also keen to initiate a debate about SIGGEN itself and about its role in supporting both the INLG/ENLG conferences and the organisation of shared tasks. While shared tasks are an important factor in furthering the development of a scientific field, they are time consuming and require strong individual commitment. We will endeavour to set up a more permanent infrastructure whose role will be to encourage and support the organisation of shared tasks for NLG.