[Corpora-List] ACL2003 CFP: Workshop on Multilingual Summarization and Question Answering--Machine Learning and Beyond

[Priscilla Rasmussen]

CALL FOR WORKSHOP PAPERS

ACL 2003 Post-conference Workshop
Sapporo Convention Center, Sapporo, Japan
July 11-12, 2003

Workshop on "Multilingual Summarization and Question Answering -
Machine Learning and Beyond"

Automatic summarization and question answering aim at producing a
concise, condensed representation of the key information content in an
information source for a particular user and task. Interest in automati=
c
summarization and question answering continues to grow, motivated by th=
e
explosion of on-line information sources and advances in natural
language processing and information retrieval. In fact, various forms o=
f
automatic summarization and question answering will undoubtedly be
indispensable given the massive information universes that lie ahead in=

the 21st century.

Summarization and question answering involves the extraction or
generation of text snippets to fulfill some user needs. Rule-based or
statistical-based summarization and QA systems have shown promising
results in the TREC QA-tracks, NTCIR QAC, and NIST DUC; it is, however,=

very difficult to find good evaluation functions or rules that work wel=
l
across domains or in all questions because there are many system
parameters that must be carefully tuned in order to achieve good system=

performance. In consequence, various machine learning (ML) techniques
have recently been applied to summarization and QA systems.

The purpose of this workshop is to provide a forum for exploring the
commonality underling this diversity of problem domain and approaches.

    The workshop has the following goals:

     - to bring together communities of researchers who apply machine
       learning techniques to summarization and QA systems,
     - to deepen the summarization and QA community's understanding of
       the state of the art in machine learning,
     - to identify summarization and QA-related problems for
       which ML techniques might be appropriate, and
     - to advance the state of the art of summarization and QA
      technologies.

    Topics appropriate to this workshop include:

     - summarization or QA systems with ML techniques,
     - novel or improved ML techniques for summarization or QA,
     - effective feature extraction methods for characterizing
       summarization or QA,
     - metrics and benchmarks for evaluating the effect of machine
       learning techniques in summarization or QA systems,
     - generation for summarization or QA,
     - cross-language or multilingual QA,
     - integration with Web and IR access,
     - corpora creation for summarization or QA,
     - interfaces and tools for summarization or QA.

FORMAT FOR SUBMISSIONS
Submissions are limited to original, unpublished work. Submissions must=

use the ACL latex style or Microsoft Word style MSQA-submission.doc
(both available from the here workshop web page). Paper submissions
should consist of a full paper (5000 words or less, exclusive of title
page and references). Papers outside the specified length are subject t=
o
be rejected without review. The paper should be written in English.

SUBMISSION QUESTIONS
Please send submission questions to Abraham Ittycheriah (abei at us.ibm.co=
m).

SUBMISSION PROCEDURE
Electronic submission only: send the pdf (preferred), postscript, or MS=

Word form of your submission to: abei at us.ibm.com (Abraham Ittycheriah) =
The
Subject
line should be "ACL2003 WORKSHOP PAPER SUBMISSION". Because reviewing i=
s
blind, no
author information is included as part of the paper. An identification
page must be sent in a separate email with the subject line: "ACL2003
WORKSHOP ID PAGE" and must include title, all authors, theme area,
keywords, word count, and an abstract of no more than 5 lines. Late
submissions will not be accepted. Notification of receipt will be
e-mailed to the first author shortly after receipt.

DEADLINES (Tentative)

 Paper submission deadline:              =A0Apr 21, 2003

 Notification of acceptance for papers:  =A0May 19, 2003

 Camera ready papers due:                =A0May 26, 2003

 Workshop date:                          =A0July 11-12, 2003





PROGRAM CHAIRS
Abraham Ittycheriah  IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, USA
Tsuneaki Kato        University of Tokyo, Japan
Chin-Yew Lin         USC/ISI, USA
Yutaka Sasaki        NTT Communication Science Laboratories, Japan

PROGRAM COMMITTEE
Regina Barzilay      Columbia University, USA
Jason Chang          National Tsin-Hua University, Taiwan
Hsin-Hsi Chen        National Taiwan University, Taiwan
Jennifer Chu-Carroll IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, USA
Udo Hahn             University of Freiburg, Germany
Sanda Harabagiu      Univ. of Texas, Dallas, USA
Donna Harman         NIST, USA
Ulf Hermjakob        USC/ISI, USA
Jerry Hobbs          USC/ISI, USA
Inderjeet Mani       MITRE Corp. USA
Junichi Fukumoto     Ritsumeikan University, Japan
Gary Geunbae Lee     Postech, South Korea
Hideki Isozaki       NTT Communication Science Laboratories, Japan
Sadao Kurohashi      University of Tokyo, Japan
Hang Li              Microsoft Research Asia, China
Dekang Lin           University of Alberta, Canada
Bernardo Magnini     Istituto Trentino di Cultura (ITC)/IRST, Italy
Shigeru Masuyama     Toyohashi University of Technology, Japan
Dan Moldovan         Univ. of Texas, Dallas, USA
Tatsunori Mori       Yokohama National University, Japan
Hwee Tou Ng          National University of Singapore, Singapore
Manabu Okumura       Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan
John Prager          IBM Research, USA
Drago Radev          University of Michigan, USA
Dan Roth             University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign, USA
Satoshi Sekine       New York University, USA
Karen Sparck-Jones   Cambridge University, UK
Tomek Strzalkowski   State University of New York, Albany, USA
Ingrid Zukerman      Monash University, Australia