LINGUIST List 11.1418

Mon Jun 26 2000

Calls: Text Summmarization, Information Structure

Editor for this issue: Jody Huellmantel <jodylinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Dragomir Radev, Special issue of Computational Linguistics on Text Summmarization
2. Kerstin Schwabe, Information structure/Referential Status of Linguistic Expressions

			 CALL FOR PAPERS


			 SPECIAL ISSUE
				 of
		 COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS
				 on
			 TEXT SUMMARIZATION


====================================================================
Guest Editors:

Dragomir Radev
radevumich.edu
University of Michigan

Kathy McKeown
kathycs.columbia.edu
Columbia University

Eduard Hovy
hovyisi.edu
University of Southern California/Information Sciences Institute
=====================================================================


Text summarization is one of the more complex challenges of natural
language processing. Its goal is to summarize the content of one or 
more documents depending on the information needs of the user. 

Current research in text summarization involves statistical and
knowledge-rich approaches that involve sentence and/or phrase
extraction and text generation. Most current systems first identify
the most salient information in the input material and then synthesize
that information while trying to preserve the essence of the original
text.

Interest in text summarization has risen over the last 10 years due to
the advent of the Internet and the unprecedented availability of
on-line textual data. In recent years, the "three Ms"
(multilinguality, multidocument, multimedia) have motivated some
exciting research projects. Most recently in the USA, the TIDES
program has funded several projects that involve multidocument and
eventually multilingual summarization.

Reflecting these events, researchers have organized several meetings
over the past years. The most recent such meeting at the ANLP/NAACL
conference in Seattle attracted 100 participants (including from
academia, industrial labs, startups, and the government) from the US,
Canada, the UK, Germany, France, Korea, Israel, Japan, Sweden,
Singapore, Spain, Hong Kong, and Belgium. Research in summarization
is also active in a dozen more countries throughout the world. Europe,
and the rest of the world.

The first collection of papers related to document summarization
appeared in 1995 in a special issue of Information Processing and
Management edited by Karen Sparck-Jones and Brigitte
Endres-Niggemeyer. A compendium of papers on text summarization,
edited by Inderjeet Mani and Mark Maybury, appeared in 1998. Most of
these papers date from an ACL/EACL workshop in 1997 and earlier.
There has been no general collection of papers since that time.
Therefore we believe the time is ripe for Computational Linguistics to
present an overview of the state of the art in text summarization.


		 SAMPLE TOPICS OF INTEREST

Linguistic and statistics based techniques for topic identification
Linguistic and statistics based techniques for summary generation
Studies of human summarization 
Evaluating summaries and summarization systems 
Multidocument summarization, including reconciliation of inconsistencies 
Multilingual summarization
Summarization metadata: determining and expressing trustworthiness and recency 
Types and classes of summaries


				NOTES

Papers should not simply describe an existing system. Of primary interest 
is the theoretical basis for the summarization process, summary evaluation, 
and the typology of summaries; the particular implementation of a set of 
word- and phrase-weighting techniques is of secondary concern. 


			 SCHEDULE

Call for papers issued: June 23, 2000
Papers due: December 15, 2000
Notifications to authors: March 15, 2001


			 SUBMISSION PROCESS

Electronic submission is preferred, but hard copy will also be
accepted. No attachments are to be submitted under any circumstances.
If sending hard copies, you should submit six copies. 
All submissions should be sent to the journal editor (Julia Hirschberg) 
according to the instructions in http://www.aclweb.org/cl/ . 

In addition to following the procedure described there, authors should
send the abstract of their paper electronically to the three guest
editors: <radevperun.si.umich.edu>, <kathycs.columbia.edu>,
<hovyISI.EDU>.

Note that for this special issue two types of papers will be accepted: 
long papers (more than 20 pages) and short papers (less than 20
pages). Both types of papers will be reviewed according to the same
criteria. We would ideally like to have papers of both types in the
printed journal.

Questions about the submission process should be addressed to
radevumich.edu 

Each submitted paper will be refereed by two experts appointed by the
permanent editorial board of CL and by two more reviewers selected by
the guest editors.

CALL FOR PAPERS


	INFORMATION STRUCTURE AND THE REFERENTIAL
	 STATUS OF LINGUISTIC EXPRESSIONS

 Workshop is part of the 23th annual meeting of the
 Deutsche Gesellschaft f�r Sprachwissenschaft (=DGfS).
	 http://www.uni-leipzig.de/~dgfs2001

 University of Leipzig

 28 February - 2 March 2001


DESCRIPTION

Information structure has been of great interest for some time. In recent
theories, information structure is investigated with respect to its
relation to intonation, its role in the interpretation of focus particles,
or its impact on establishing ellipsis. However, there are very few
approaches that focus on the effect of information structure on the
referential status of linguistic expressions.

The Workshop intends to discuss the relation between information structure
and the referential properties of two prominent linguistic units:
indefinite NPs and clauses. On the one hand, we intend to discuss the
interpretation of indefinite NPs with respect to the information structure,
on the other hand, we want to investigate the connection between
information structure and sentence mood.

Specific areas of inquiry include, but are not limited to the following:

1. What is the impact of linguistic context
 on the interpretation of indefinite NPs?
2. How are indefinites interpreted in contrastive focus,
 presentational focus or background as well as in topic or comment?
3. To what extend does the interpretation of an indefinite
 depend on the sentence mood of the sentence it is embedded in?
 (Cf. 'Have you seen a dog? *Yes, I've fed it. vs.
 Peter has seen a dog. He has fed it.)
4. How does information structure syntactically
 and semantically interact with sentence mood?
5. Are there any pieces of evidence for the assumption
 that information structure may determine the
 referential status of a sentence?
6. How do discourse relations determine the sentence
 types and thus the referential status of the
 respective sentence?

The objective of the workshop is to integrate syntactic investigations on
the field of sentence mood with semantic approaches towards the
interpretation of indefinite NPs in the light of information structure and
hopes thus to gain synergetically new insights.

ABSTRACT SUBMISSION

Abstracts are invited for thirty-minute talks (twenty minutes for
presentation plus ten minutes for discussion)

Papers may be presented in German or English

Please submit:
- an anonymous one-page abstract, single-spaced in 12-pt Times font;
- for each author, one copy of the information form below.

Electronic submissions are encouraged; abstracts should be attached in
plain text format or as Word files.


DEADLINE

 All submissions must be received by August 31, 2000.

Send submissions to:
	Kerstin Schwabe
 	ZAS
 	Jaegerstr. 10/11
 	D-10117 Berlin
 	Germany

 Send abstracts by FAX to: +49 - 30 - 20 192 402
 or by e-mail to: schwabezas.gwz-berlin.de

Notification of acceptance will be emailed in mid-September.

IMPORTANT DATES

* 31 August 2000: 	deadline for submittal of abstracts
* 15 September 2000: 	notification of acceptance
* 28 Feb.- 2. March: 	workshop


CONTACT

For further information contact one of the organizers:

Klaus von Heusinger		klaus.heusingeruni-konstanz.de
Kerstin Schwabe		schwabezas.gwz-berlin.de

or our workshop homepage:
http://ling.uni-konstanz.de/pages/home/heusinger/konf-proj/AG01/



LOCAL ORGANISATION

Prof. Dr. Gerhild Zybatow
Universit�t Leipzig
Institut f�r Slavistik

http://www.uni-leipzig.de/~dgfs2001

- --------------------------

AUTHOR INFORMATION FORM

title of the talk:

name(s) of the author(s):

affiliation(s):

mailing address of the first author:

email-addresses: