DUC 2002: Call for Participation

Over the last five years, we have witnessed a tremendous increase in interest in summarization research from both academia and industry. A DARPA program, Translingual Information Detection, Extraction, and Summarization (TIDES), specifically calls for major advances in summarization technology, both in English and from other languages to English (cross-language summarization). As part of this program, NIST began a new evaluation series in the area of text summarization, called the Document Understanding Conference (DUC).

The first of these evaluations, DUC 2001, took place last September in New Orleans. Fifteen groups participated in the evaluation of generic summaries of newspaper and newswire data. Various levels of text compression were tested, with both single summaries and summaries of multiple documents (around 10 documents per set) being evaluated. Summaries were examined for their coverage and for their readability by 10 human judges using software developed at USC/ISI.

You are invited to participate in DUC 2002. Training material is available from NIST, and test material will be distributed the end of March. NIST will collect and evaluate the results in early April using the same group of people that created the reference summaries. The DUC 2002 workshop is planned for mid-July.

Dissemination of DUC work and results other than in the (publicly available) conference proceedings is welcomed, but the conditions of participation preclude specific advertising claims based on DUC results. All summarization results submitted to DUC will be published in the Proceedings and archived on the DUC web site.

More information on DUC, including the schedule, the data, and the plans for evaluation can be seen on the DUC web site.

Organizations wishing to participate in DUC 2002 should respond to this call for participation by submitting an application consisting of 1) contact information (organization name, full mailing address, voice and fax phone numbers, email of a main DUC contact) and 2) a short paragraph on the organization's summarization approach

All applications should be submitted by January 1 to Lori.Buckland@nist.gov. Any questions concerning DUC should be sent to Paul.Over@nist.gov. Late applications may be accepted if resources allow, but in no case will training data be released to groups who have not applied.