Corpora: Prelim. Call for Participation: Text Summarization/Document Understanding Conference

[Priscilla Rasmussen]

Preliminary Call for Participation
Text Summarization and Document Understanding Conference

Over the last five years, we have witnessed a tremendous increase in
interest in summarization research from both the academia and the
industry. In spite of this, we do not know yet what summarization
techniques are most adequate, what systems perform the best, and what
evaluation techniques are most appropriate for assessing the quality
of a summary. To further progress in the field and enable researchers
participate in large-scale experiments, the National Institute of
Standards and Technology is beginning a new evaluation series in the
area of text summarization, tentatively called the Document
Understanding Conference (DUC).  The basic design for the evaluation
follows ideas in a recent summarization road map that was created by a
committee of researchers in summarization, headed by Daniel Marcu.
Plans call for the creation of reference data (documents and
summaries) for training and testing.  The training data will be
distributed in March of 2001, test data distributed in June, and
results due for evaluation the first of August 2001.  A workshop will
be held in September to discuss these results and to make further
plans.

For further details on the evaluation or on the road map, see
     http://www-nlpir.nist.gov/projects/duc/.
To be added to a mailing list for further announcements, please
contact donna.harman at nist.gov. To contribute to the summarization
roadmap, please contact marcu at isi.edu.