Shared Task Proposal on Multilingual Surface Realization using Universal Dependency Trees

We propose a Shared Task on multilingual Surface Realization, i.e. the mapping from unordered and uninflected universal dependency trees to correctly ordered and inflected sentences in a number of languages. A second deeper input will be available, in which, in addition, functional words, fine-grained PoS and morphological information will be removed. The first Shared Task on Surface Realization was carried out in 2011 with a similar setup, with a focus on English. We think that it is time for relaunching such a Shared Task effort in view of the arrival of Universal Dependencies annotated treebanks for a large number of languages on the one hand, and the increasing dominance of Deep Learning, which proved to be a game changer for NLP, on the other hand.