We are pleased to introduce the technical program of the Fifth International Natural Language Generation Conference (INLG 2008), the Biennial Meeting of SIGGEN, the ACL Special Interest Group in Natural Language Generation. INLG is the leading international conference on research into natural language generation. It has been held in Sydney (Australia) in 2006, at Brockenhurst (UK) in 2004, in Harriman (New York, USA) in 2002, and in Mitzpe Ramon (Israel) in 2000. Prior to 2000, the INLG meetings were International Workshops, running every other year since 1984. The INLG conference provides a forum for the discussion, dissemination and archiving of research topics and results in the field of text generation. This year, INLG is being held immediately prior to the main ACL-08:HLT conference, on June 12--14, 2008, in southeastern Ohio, USA, at the Salt Fork Resort and Conference Center.
The INLG program consists of substantial, original, and previously unpublished results on all topics related to natural language generation. This year, as in previous years, each submission was reviewed by at least three members of an international program committee of leading researchers in the field, listed on the next page. We received 35 submissions (both full papers and poster papers) from all over the world, from which we accepted 17 as full papers and 7 as posters. One poster was subsequently retracted as unfortunately the authors could not find sponsorship to attend the conference.
This year, the program includes two invited talks, one by Kiwako Ito and Shari Speer (The Ohio State University, USA), entitled "Prominence and Phrasing in Spoken Discourse Processing," and one by Matthew Stone (Rutgers University, USA), entitled "Language, Embodiment and Social Intelligence." We are also excited to host a special session devoted to the Referring Expression Generation Challenge 2008, organized by Anja Belz (University of Brighton, UK) and Albert Gatt (University of Aberdeen, UK).