Dear GREC'09 Participants,

After careful consideration and consultation with participants, we have
decided to extend the system development period for both GREC'09 Tasks,
i.e. GREC-MSR and GREC-NEG.

The reasons are that firstly, several teams were having difficulties
finishing their systems on time for the January 31st deadline, and that
secondly, the EACL'09 Workshops camera-ready deadline (and therefore that
of ENLG'09 which Generation Challenges 2009 is part of) was moved to
earlier in February and it was going to be very difficult to meet this new
deadline.

The results session will now be part of the ACL-IJCNLP'09 Workshop on
Language Generation and Summarisation on August 6, 2009 in Singapore.
The results report and participants' reports will be included in this
workshop's proceedings (and will therefore also end up in the ACL
Anthology).

We believe that this workshop is a very good match for the GREC Tasks, as
there will be many summarisation researchers present.  We also hope that
co-locating with ACL will mean that more participants will be able to
attend the results session.

We are currently working out a new submission schedule and are considering
whether to re-open the competition to new participants.  If you have any
views about this, please let us know.

We will let you know the new schedule as soon as possible, but meanwhile
you can expect the new submission deadline to be around the middle of
April (1st May at the very latest).

Finally, please remember that the most recent version of the GREC-MSR
training/development data is 2009-01-09 and the most recent version of
geval is 2009-01-19, and that both of these are available from the GREC'09
homepage.

If you have any questions at all, don't hesitate to get in touch.

With best wishes,

Anja