OBJECTIVE
Summarization technology has the potential of adding significant value in the context of information retrieval applications. Summarization can provide, for example, an alternative display mode for retrieved documents; a new method of concentrating information for relevance feedback; and a means for presenting information specific to groups of related documents and web sites. There has been a long history of research in this area by both the retrieval and the natural language processing communities, with summarization papers being presented at SIGIR and ACL. However we still do not know what summarization techniques are most adequate for which purposes and what evaluation techniques are most appropriate for assessing the quality of a summary.

The purpose of this workshop is two-fold. The first day of the workshop will serve as a focal point for presenting new results in this area. This will include invited presentations focusing on various open problems in summarization research, presentations of original scientific papers. and an overview of the goals and results from a new evaluation effort in summarization called DUC (Document Understanding Conference). The optional second day of the workshop will be devoted to presenting more detailed results from the first DUC evaluation and to discussing plans for the future of DUC.

TOPICS OF INTEREST
Contributions of papers are solicited dealing with, but not limited to, the following areas:

• Production of abstracts and extracts
  
• Multidocument summarization
  
• Multilingual summarization
  
• Summarization of multimodal input
  
• Summarization applications
  
• Studies and modeling of human summarizers
  
• User studies focused on the use of summaries
  
• Evaluation and text/training corpora
  
• Integration with web and IR access
  
• Interaction with question answering
  
• Query-based summarization
  
• Work done for the DUC evaluation
  
  
  

WORKSHOP CHAIRS
Donna Harman (National Institute of Standards and Technology)
Daniel Marcu (University of Southern California/Information Sciences Institute)

PROGRAM COMMITTEE
Takahiro Fukusima (Otemon Gakuin University, Japan)
Eduard Hovy (University of Southern California/Information
Sciences Institute, USA) Inderjeet Mani (MITRE, USA)
Kathleen McKeown (Columbia University, USA)
Manabu Okumura (Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan)
Paul Over (National Institute of Standards and Technology, USA)
Dragomir Radev (University of Michigan, USA)
Karen Sparck Jones (University of Cambridge, U.K)
Tomek Strzalkowski (State University of New York at Albany, USA)

PARTICIPATION
Participation is open to anyone with an interest in summarization. There will be an optional second day for those interested in the DUC evaluation, and an additional registration fee will be required. Those desiring to make a presentation on the first day should submit a paper (of at most 8 pages) for consideration by the program committee.

Only electronic submissions will be accepted. Please submit a postscript or PDF file that prints on 8.5 x 11" paper to [email protected] by July 10, 2001.

CORRESPONDENCE
Direct correspondence and inquiries related to this workshop should be addressed to: Ellen Voorhees.

IMPORTANT DATES
Paper Submission: July 10, 2001
Notification of acceptance: August 3, 2001
Final submission: August 26, 2001
Workshop: September 13 (and 14), 2001

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