ACL’2000

ACL’2000

3-6 October, 2000

Hong Kong

TEXT SUMMARIZATION THEME SESSION

CHAIR:

Inderjeet Mani

SESSION DESCRIPTION:

Automatic summarization aims at providing a condensed representation of the content of an information source in a manner sensitive to the needs of the user and task. Interest in summarization continues to grow, motivated by the explosion of on-line information sources and advances in natural language processing and information retrieval. As we emerge into the 21st Century, the massive information universes that lie ahead make some form of text summarization indispensable.

While the field continues to progress, there are also many problems in summarization per se, as well as in areas of NL understanding and NL generation, that need to be addressed before the promises of automatic text summarization can be fully realized. In addition to developing better theoretical foundations and improved characterization of summarization problems, increased work on evaluation methods and summarization resources, especially corpora, is of great interest. The challenges of summarization offer great opportunities for research on a variety of NLP problems to demonstrate its benefits in an area of increased interest.

THEME FOCUS:

The main focus of this theme is on Multilingual Summarization. While much summarization work has focused on English, this is an opportune time to focus on other languages. We therefore especially encourage papers which address:

Summarization of languages other than English
Summarizers which can handle multiple input languages
Summarizers whose output is in a different language from the input
Evaluation methods for multilingual summarization

OTHER TOPICS:

In addition to the theme focus, we invite contributions on the following subjects, which continue to be of considerable interest:

NL Generation for Summarization
Multidocument Summarization
Multimedia Summarization (including summarization of audio)
Topic Identification and Concept Fusion for Summarization
Biographical Summaries
Summarization of Dialogue
Query or Question-Focused Summarization
Statistical Models
Narrative Techniques in Summarization
Use of Thesauri and Ontologies
Evaluation Methods
Studies of Human Abstractors
Development and Exploitation of Corpora for Summarization
Practical Applications of Summarization

SUBMISSION INFORMATION:

Submissions should be sent directly to the ACL Program Committee chairs as with regular main session submissions by the April 7, 2000 deadline (Paper registration by March 31st, 2000 ). Information can be found at the ACL '2000 web site: http://www.cs.ust.hk/acl2000/. Submissions should be marked for inclusion in this special topic session. We look forward to reviewing your submissions. Please feel free to contact us with any questions you may have.

REVIEW COMMITTEE:

Chinatsu Aone (SRA)

Branimir Boguraev (IBM T.J. Watson Labs)

Michael Elhadad (Ben Gurion University)

Brigitte.Endres-Niggemeyer (Univ of Applied Sciences, Hannover)

Takahiro Fukushima (TAO)

Jade Goldstein (CMU)

Udo Hahn (Freiburg University)

Hongyan Jing (Columbia University)

Inderjeet Mani (MITRE)

Daniel Marcu (ISI)

Mark Maybury (MITRE)

Kathy McKeown (Columbia University)

Sung Hyon Myaeng (Chungnam National University)

Akitoshi Okumura (NEC Media Research Labs)

Chris Paice (University of Lancaster)

Dragomir Radev (University of Michigan)

Karen Sparck-Jones (University of Cambridge)

Tomek Strzalkowski (GE CR&D)

Benjamin Tsou (City University of Hong Kong)

Last edited: January 12, 2000