[Corpora-List] 2nd CFP: ACL 2003 Workshop on Multilingual Summarization and QA - Machine Learnign and Beyond; Deadline: Arpil 21, 2003

[Chin-Yew Lin]

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"

Invited Speakers: (1) Noriko Kando  Library Information Research
                                    National Institute of Informatics
(NII)
                                    Japan
                  (2) Dan Roth      Dept. of Computer Sciences
                                    Univ. of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign
                                    USA

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 automatic
summarization
and question answering continues to grow, motivated by the explosion of
on-line information sources and advances in natural language processing
and
information retrieval. In fact, various forms of 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 well 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 to be rejected without
review.
The paper should be written in English.

<<SUBMISSION QUESTIONS>>
Please send submission questions to Abraham Ittycheriah
(abei at us.ibm.com).

<<SUBMISSION PROCEDURE>>
Electronic submission only: send the pdf (preferred), postscript, or MS
Word
form of your submission to: abei at us.ibm.com. The Subject line should be
"ACL2003 WORKSHOP PAPER SUBMISSION". Because reviewing is 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>>

 Paper submission deadline:              Apr 21, 2003

 Notification of acceptance for papers:  May 19, 2003

 Camera ready papers due:                May 26, 2003

 Workshop date:                          July 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