R O A D   M A P P I N G

There is currently much interest and activity aimed at building powerful multi-purpose information systems. The agencies involved include DARPA, ARDA and NIST. Their programmes, for example DARPA's TIDES (Translingual Information Detection Extraction and Summarization) programme, ARDA's Advanced Question & Answering Program and NIST's TREC (Text Retrieval Conferences) programme cover a range of subprogrammes. These are focused on different tasks requiring their own evaluation designs. Work on two key tasks, Question Answering and Summarization, is already underway, but calls for a research framework and longer term evaluation plan. An ad-hoc Review Committee, chaired by Donna Harman, has begun to provide this. The Committee has taken a deliberately ambitious Vision Statement, setting out what a comprehensive system for an information analyst should be able to do, as a starting point; and it has asked two community groups to prepare specific five-year Road Maps for Question Answering and Summarization. The current Road Maps are first drafts, to be developed and refined as the research advances. They are being made public, as first drafts, to encourage interest and participation, TREC-style, in the proposed research programmes, and in the particular test and evaluations for which Calls will be published.

• Final Vision Paper
•   Final Vision Paper (.doc)
•   Final Vision Paper (.pdf)
• Final Vision Paper (.ps)


• Summarization Roadmap
•   Summarization Roadmap (.doc)
•   Summarization Roadmap (.pdf)


• QA Roadmap Paper
•   QA Roadmap (.doc)
•   QA Roadmap (.pdf)
• QA Roadmap (.ps)