We are sending this to you because you indicated interest
in following the summarization work going on in DUC.
There was a very successful first evaluation, with the
workshop taking place in September.  The online proceedings
from that workshop are now available on the DUC website.

http://www-nlpir.nist.gov/projects/duc

Also on that website is information about the upcoming
DUC evaluation, DUC 2002.  Attached for your convenience
is a call for participation in that workshop.

Hope this is of use to you,

-Donna



     
     D U C  2 0 0 2 :   C a l l   f o r   P a r t i c i p a t i o n

                  Document Understanding Conference (DUC)

                          January 2002 - July 2002

                               Conducted by:
           National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)

                             With support from:
              Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)

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-document 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. The tasks will be very similar to the DUC 2001 tasks described
above. 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.

                   http://www-nlpir.nist.gov/projects/duc

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.