ACL'97/EACL'97 Workshop on
               INTELLIGENT SCALABLE TEXT SUMMARIZATION
                 (at ACL'97/EACL'97 Joint Conference)
                            Madrid, Spain
                         July 11 or 12, 1997

                           CALL FOR PAPERS

             (http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~radev/ists97)

With the explosion in the quantity of on-line information in recent
years, demand for text summarization technology appears to be
growing. Commercial companies are increasingly starting to offer text
summarization capabilities, often bundled with information retrieval
tools. These recent developments offer opportunities as well as
substantial challenges for research in text summarization. In general,
such developments create a practical need for summarization systems
which scale up when applied to large volumes of unrestricted text.

At ACL'97/EACL'97, a particular challenge is to identify the niches
where natural language processing (NLP) can make an impact.  For
example, there are applications which require characterizing the
content of large text collections to support data mining functions,
but NLP has not been used much in such applications. Traditionally,
shallower techniques have been leveraged to achieve the desired levels
of scalability and domain-independence, but recent advances in robust
information extraction as well as approaches integrating statistical
and symbolic techniques open up possibilities for more powerful yet
scalable summarization techniques.

With the renewed interest in text summarization, another challenge is
to develop criteria to help evaluate different methodologies, in order
to better advise investors and the interested public on technology
choices. While there have been focused workshops in the past on text
summarization, they have pre-dated the tremendous expansion of on-line
information access fueled by the recent growth of the World Wide
Web. This workshop would bring together researchers interested in
advancing the scientific frontiers of text summarization to meet these
new practical challenges and opportunities.

Submissions are invited on original research in all aspects of text
summarization, including, but not limited to:

* Statistical, linguistic, and knowledge-based techniques in
intelligent summarization
* Multimodal summarization strategies
* Exploiting advances in information extraction in summarization
* Text generation for scalable summarization
* Classification criteria for summarization systems
* Evaluation methods and metrics
* Summarization in operational contexts: requirements, architectures,
lessons learned
* Tailoring summaries to particular users, tasks, and contexts
* Theoretical foundations, including cognitive models
* Combining scalability with abstraction in summarization
* Summarization across multiple documents/sources
* Multilingual summarization

Criteria for selection will include clarity, originality, relevance,
and significance of results. Attendees at the workshop MUST register
for the main ACL/EACL conference.

                          PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Udo Hahn            University of Freiburg
Julian Kupiec       Xerox Palo Alto Research Center
Inderjeet Mani      The MITRE Corporation     (co-chair)
Mark Maybury        The MITRE Corporation     (co-chair)
Kathy McKeown       Columbia University
Boyan Onyshkevych   US Department of Defense
Dragomir Radev      Columbia University
Lisa Rau            SRA International
Kazuo Tanaka        NTT Human Interface Laboratories

                        SUBMISSION INFORMATION

DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSION: March 15, 1997
Acceptance Notification: April 28, 1997

Interested participants should submit a previously unpublished paper
addressing a specific text summarization issue or reporting novel
methods and results. Authors should indicate whether the paper is
being submitted elsewhere. As the papers will be reviewed anonymously,
please do not include author names in the body of the paper; instead
provide a separate title page with title, author names and email
addresses. The paper length (excluding separate title page) should be
no longer than 8 pages. For email submissions, please submit
postscript. (If the postscript doesn't print properly here, you may
eventually have to submit a hardcopy, so please budget enough time for
that.) For hardcopy submissions, please submit FIVE copies of the
paper.

Please send submissions to:

Inderjeet Mani
The MITRE Corporation, W640
1820 Dolley Madison Blvd
McLean, VA 22102-3481, USA
Phone: 1-703-883-6149
Fax: 1-703-883-1279
Email: imani@mitre.org

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