Workshop on Multilingual Summarization and Question Answering 2004
 
Automatic summarization and question answering (QA) are now enjoying a
period of revival and they are advancing at a much quicker pace than
before. Recently in the United States, TREC started an English QA
track in 1999 and DUC sponsored by NIST also started a new English
summarization evaluation series in 2001. In Japan, NTCIR project
included Japanese text summarization task in 2000 and QA task in 2001.

One major challenge of these large scale evaluation efforts is how we
can evaluate summarization and QA systems systematically and
automatically. In other words, is there a consistent and principled
way in estimating the quality of any summarization and QA systems
accurately and can we automate the evaluation process? The release of
the "Framework for Machine Translation Evaluation in ISLE (FEMTI)" and
the recent adoption of the automatic evaluation metrics, BLEU and
NIST, in the machine translation community are good examples that we
might be able to find leverage from and extend them to summarization
and QA evaluations. A good example in automatic evaluation of
summaries is the ROUGE method developed at the Information Sciences
Institute, University of Southern California.

This workshop focuses on automatic summarization and QA, and enable
participants to discuss the integration of multiple languages and
multiple functions and most importantly how to robustly estimate
quality of summarization and QA. We also welcome submissions related
to any aspects of summarization and QA with main sections dedicated to
evaluation.

FORMAT FOR SUBMISSIONS

Submissions are limited to original, unpublished work. Submissions
must use the ijc-NLP LaTeX style files or Microsoft Word Style files
tailored for ijc-NLP. The ijc-NLP style files can be found here. Paper
submissions should consist of a full paper (5000 words or less,
exclusive of title page and references). Papers outside the specified
length are subject to be rejected without review. The paper should be
written in English.



Please send submission questions to Chin-Yew Lin cyl at isi.edu.

SUBMISSION PROCEDURE

Electronic submission only: send the pdf (preferred), postscript, or
MS Word form of your submission to: Chin-Yew Lin cyl at isi.edu. The
Subject line should be "IJCNLP-04 WORKSHOP PAPER SUBMISSION". Because
reviewing is blind, no author information is included as part of the
paper. An identification page must be sent in a separate email with
the subject line: "IJCNLP-04 WORKSHOP ID PAGE" and must include title,
all authors, theme area (i.e. summarization, QA, or both), keywords,
word count, and an abstract of no more than 5 lines. Late submissions
will not be accepted. Notification of receipt will be e-mailed to the
first author shortly after receipt. DEADLINES (Tentative)

Paper submission deadline: Jan 19, 2004
Notification of acceptance for papers: Feb 12, 2004
Camera ready papers due: Feb 26, 2004
Workshop date: March 25, 2004