INTELLIGENT TEXT SUMMARIZATION http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~radev/aaai-sss98-its With the proliferation of online textual resources, it has become very difficult to find information of interest. Improving access to online information includes finding relevant documents (Information Retrieval) and presenting only information that matches the user's interests (Text Summarization). In the recent very successful workshop on Intelligent Scalable Text Summarization at the ACL/EACL conference, papers focused largely on statistical approaches. In this symposium, we aim to discuss also the strengths of other, symbolic/rule-based, techniques. We particularly welcome contributions that address some of the fundamental issues underlying summarization: what is a summary? What is an abstract? How can one evaluate the quality of a summary? The symposium will include formal presentations and discussions of existing techniques and open problems. Using input from potential participants, the program committee will present a series of questions to which attendees will be encouraged to suggest approaches and solutions. Sample topics: - Knowledge Representation Issues - AI and Statistical Techniques - Discourse Analysis and Discourse Planning - Concise Text Generation - Summarization of Multiple Documents - Generation of Updates - Architectures for Summarization - Multilingual and Multimodal Summarization - User Modeling - Scalability - Evaluation of Text Summarization Potential participants should submit one of the following: o Full technical paper (PostScript, 11-point font, up to 5000 words). o Statement of interest (up to 1000 words): - description of an ongoing research effort, - position statement, - description of a problem to be discussed, - proposal for an activity related to text summarization that can take place at the symposium, - description of a completed summarization system, or - descriptions of tools, corpora, or other resources, especially if they can be shared with others. o Description of a demonstration or video. Participants are encouraged to include URLs related to text summarization (bibliographies, papers, projects, tools, corpora). Selection will be made in the following order: 1. people who present papers (one person per paper) 2. other presenters 3. collaborators of the above 4. people with strong statements of interest 5. others as space permits. Submissions for the symposium are due on October 24, 1997. Notification of acceptance will be given by November 14, 1997. Materials to be included in the working notes of the symposium must be received by January 17, 1998. Send all submissions electronically to radev@cs.columbia.edu If you are unsure whether your file will print at our site, please submit four days before the deadline in order to receive a confirmation. Dragomir Radev (co-chair) Department of Computer Science Columbia University 1214 Amsterdam Avenue New York, NY 10027-7003, USA Phone: 1-212-939-7118 Fax: 1-212-666-0140 ORGANIZING COMMITTEE Branimir Boguraev Apple Computer bkb@research.apple.com Michael Elhadad Ben-Gurion University elhadad@cs.bgu.ac.il Eduard Hovy USC/ISI hovy@isi.edu (co-chair) Inderjeet Mani MITRE imani@mitre.org Daniel Marcu University of Toronto marcu@cs.toronto.edu Kathleen McKeown Columbia University kathy@cs.columbia.edu Dragomir Radev Columbia University radev@cs.columbia.edu (co-chair) Amit Singhal AT&T Research singhal@research.att.com Karen Sparck Jones University of Cambridge ksj@cl.cam.ac.uk Stan Szpakowicz University of Ottawa szpak@csi.uottawa.ca