[Corpora-List] CFP - Summarization and QA Workshop (MSQA 2004) in IJCNLP-04

[Chin-Yew Lin]

CALL FOR PAPERS

WORKSHOP ON MULTILINGUAL SUMMARIZATION AND QUESTION ANSWERING 2004

Workshop on
Multilingual Summarization and Question Answering (2004)
- Towards Systematizing and Automatic Evaluations

(post-conference workshop in conjunction with IJCNLP-04)

March 25, 2004
Hainan Island, China

WEB SITE: http://www.isi.edu/~cyl/msqa-eval-ijcnlp04

[INTRODUCTION]
Automatic summarization and question answering (QA) are now enjoying a period of
revival and they are advancing at a much quicker pace than before. Recently in
the United States, TREC started an English QA track in 1999 and DUC sponsored by
NIST also started a new English summarization evaluation series in 2001. In
Japan, NTCIR project included Japanese text summarization task in 2000 and QA
task in 2001.

One major challenge of these large scale evaluation efforts is how we can
evaluate summarization and QA systems systematically and automatically. In other
words, is there a consistent and principled way in estimating the quality of any
summarization and QA systems accurately and can we automate the evaluation
process? The release of the "Framework for Machine Translation Evaluation in
ISLE (FEMTI)" and the recent adoption of the automatic evaluation metrics, BLEU
and NIST, in the machine translation community are good examples that we might
be able to find leverage from and extend them to summarization and QA
evaluations. A good example in automatic evaluation of summaries is the ROUGE
method developed at the Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern
California.

This workshop focuses on automatic summarization and QA, and enable participants
to discuss the integration of multiple languages and multiple functions and most
importantly how to robustly estimate quality of summarization and QA. We also
welcome submissions related to any aspects of summarization and QA with main
sections dedicated to evaluation.

[FORMAT FOR SUBMISSIONS]
      Submissions are limited to original, unpublished work. Submissions must
      use the ijc-NLP LaTeX style files or Microsoft Word Style files tailored
      for ijc-NLP. The ijc-NLP style files can be found here. 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 Chin-Yew Lin [cyl at isi.edu].

[SUBMISSION PROCEDURE]
      Electronic submission only: send the pdf (preferred), postscript, or MS
      Word form of your submission to: Chin-Yew Lin [cyl at isi.edu]. The
      Subject line should be "IJCNLP-04 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: "IJCNLP-04 WORKSHOP ID PAGE" and must include title, all
      authors, theme area (i.e. summarization, QA, or both), 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: Dec 12, 2003
      Notification of acceptance for papers: January 10, 2004
      Camera ready papers due: January 24, 2004
      Workshop date: March 25, 2004

[PROGRAM CHAIRS]
      Hang Li Microsoft Research, Asia, China
      Chin-Yew Lin USC/ISI, USA

[PROGRAM COMMITTEE]
      Hsin-Hsi Chen National Taiwan University, Taiwan
      Tat-Seng Chua National University of Singapore, Singapore
      Junichi Fukumoto Ritsumeikan University, Japan
      Takahiro Fukusima Otemon Gakuin University, Japan
      Donna Harman NIST, USA
      Hongyan Jing IBM Research, USA
      Tsuneaki Kato University of Tokyo, Japan
      Gary Geunbae Lee Postech, South Korea
      Bernardo Magnini Istituto Trentino di Cultura (ITC)/IRST, Italy
      Tadashi Nomoto National Institute of Japanese Literature, Japan
      John Prager IBM Research, USA
      Drago Radev University of Michigan, USA
      Karen Sparck-Jones Cambridge University, UK
      Simone Teufel Cambridge University, UK