CC-NLG 2018 is the third edition of a series of workshops that aim to bring together researchers dealing with text generation from a computational creativity (CC) perspective, and researchers in natural language generation (NLG) with an interest in creative aspects, while also discussing the crossovers in CC and NLG, as well as looking to dialogue systems and their creative possibilities, for example in social networks.

Discussions at CC-NLG will cover the distinct approaches of CC and NLG brought about by their respective focuses; research in computational creativity has tended to deal less with technical shifts, directed instead at cognition, aesthetics, and novelty; whilst NLG research has tended to focus on the technical and theoretical challenges of topics like readability. However, in recent years this distinction has become far less defined. NLG research deals actively with concepts of style, variation, poetics, and narrative, whilst creative researchers are developing robust implementations. This change can be seen in dialogue systems, where the usability of an interface relies on it handling out-of-domain or spontaneous user input. For example, a virtual teacher should be able to process 'Why can't pigs fly?', and a shopping assistant should be able to handle 'What cool movies are out?', while a humorous Twitterbot should be able to digest today's news. These are just a few examples in the broad domain of CC + NLG.