C A L L F O R P A R T I C I P A T I O N INTELLIGENT TEXT SUMMARIZATION AAAI 1998 Spring Symposium Series March 23-25, 1998 Stanford University, California http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~radev/aaai-sss98-its/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- This message contains the symposium program, instructions for presenters, information about travel assistance for graduate students, and related announcements. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 this symposium, we aim to discuss both the advantages of more classic, statistical sentence-extraction techniques for text summarization and the strengths of other (e.g., symbolic and rule-based) techniques. We will be looking for discussions on some fundamental questions: what is a summary? What is an abstract? How can one evaluate the quality of a summary? We will also devote time to new paradigms in summarization - multimodal and multilingual summarization, scalability, and user modeling. The symposium will include formal presentations and discussions of existing techniques and open problems. One half-day session will be devoted to evaluation of summaries and will feature breakout sessions in which participants will be expected to participate actively. Dragomir Radev and Eduard Hovy, Symposium co-chairs ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. REGISTRATION The deadline for registration for invited participants is February 6, 1998. The general registration deadline is February 27, 1998. By now, all invited participants should have received registration materials. If you haven't received the yellow registration brochure yet, let AAAI know (sss@aaai.org) or download the materials from http://www.aaai.org/Symposia/ 2. A REMINDER FOR PRESENTERS The deadline for submitting the camera-ready version of papers and permission to distribute forms is January 17. Submission instructions are available on the Symposium Web site. 3. TRAVEL ASSISTANCE FOR STUDENTS AAAI has allocated a small fund for travel assistance that can be used by graduate student participating in the symposium. Interested parties should submit the form available from the Symposium Web site by January 31, 1998. 4. BIBLIOGRAPHY Please send us your bibliographies of papers on summarization (preferably in bib format) and related Web pointers for inclusion in an extensive bibliography to be added to the symposium working notes. 5. ANNOUNCEMENT The First Automatic Text Summarization Conference (SUMMAC) will be held in 1998. The deadline for participation is February 1, 1998. More information is available from http://www.tipster.org/summcall.htm 6. SYMPOSIUM PROGRAM Monday, March 23 ================ 09:00 - 10:30 OPENING 09:00 Welcome: Dragomir Radev, Columbia University Session 1 DISCOURSE 09:10 talk 1: "To build text summaries of high quality, nuclearity is not sufficient" Daniel Marcu, USC/ISI 09:40 talk 2: "Beyond string matching and cue phrases: improving efficiency and coverage in discourse analysis" Simon Corston-Oliver, Microsoft Research 10:10 talk 3: "Sentence extraction and rhetorical classification for flexible abstracts" Simone Teufel, University of Edinburgh Marc Moens, University of Edinburgh 10:40 - 11:00 Break 11:00 - 12:30 Session 1 DISCOURSE (cont.) 11:00 Discussion Session 2 SYSTEMS 11:30 talk 1: "SummarizerTool: A robust practical text summarization" Tomek Strzalkowski, GE CRD Jin Wang, GE CRD Bowden Wise, GE CRD 12:00 talk 2: "Generating patient-specific summaries of online literature" Kathleen McKeown, Columbia University Desmond Jordan, Columbia University Vasileios Hatzivassiloglou, Columbia University 12:30 - 02:00 Lunch 02:00 - 03:30 Session 2 SYSTEMS (cont.) 02:00 talk 3: "Advantages of query biased summaries in information retrieval" Anastasios Tombros, University of Glasgow Mark Sanderson, University of Glasgow Phil Gray, University of Glasgow 02:30 talk 4: "Assembly of topic extraction modules in SUMMARIST" Chin-Yew Lin, ISI/USC 03:00 talk 5: "MINDS - Multi-lingual INteractive Document Summarization" Jim Cowie, New Mexico State University Kavi Mahesh, New Mexico State University Sergei Nirenburg, New Mexico State University Remi Zajac, New Mexico State University 03:15 talk 6: "Evaluation of automatic text summarization across multiple documents" Mary McKenna, TextWise Liz Liddy, TextWise 03:30 - 04:00 Break 04:00 - 05:30 Session 2 SYSTEMS (cont.) 04:00 Discussion 04:30 panel 7: Statistical and Symbolic Methods (moderator: Dragomir Radev) 05:30 - 06:00 Break 06:00 - 07:00 Reception Tuesday, March 24 ================= 09:00 - 10:30 Session 3 EVALUATION 09:00 talk 1: "Design and evaluation of a psychological experiment on the effectiveness of document summarization for the retrieval of multilingual WWW documents" Joanne Capstick, DFKI, Saarbruecken Gregor Erbach, DFKI, Saarbruecken Hans Uszkoreit, DFKI, Saarbruecken Dagmar Unz, MEFIS, Saarbruecken 09:30 talk 2: "Summarization evaluation methods: experiments and analysis" Hongyan Jing, Columbia University Regina Barzilay, Ben-Gurion University Kathleen McKeown, Columbia University Michael Elhadad, Ben-Gurion University 10:00 Discussion 10:30 - 11:00 Break 11:00 - 12:30 Session 3 EVALUATION (cont.) 11:00 panel 2: Evaluation (moderator: Eduard Hovy, ISI) 11:30 breakout instructions: Eduard Hovy 11:45 breakout session 12:30 - 02:00 Lunch 02:00 - 03:30 Session 3 EVALUATION (cont.) 02:00 feedback and discussion (moderator: Eduard Hovy) Session 4 COHESION 02:30 talk 1: "Using cohesion and coherence models for text summarization" Inderjeet Mani, MITRE Eric Bloedorn, MITRE Barbara Gates, MITRE 03:00 talk 2: "Text summarization based on thematic representation of texts" Natalia Loukachevitch, Institute of USA and Canada Studies 03:30 - 04:00 Break 04:00 - 05:30 Session 4 COHESION (Cont.) 04:00 talk 3: "Rewriting saves extracted summaries" Satoshi Sato, JAIST Madoka Sato, Kanazawa Gakuin University 04:30 talk 4: "Flexible summarization" JF Delannoy, RES International K. Barker, University of Ottawa T. Copeck, University of Ottawa M. Laplante, RES International S. Matwin, University of Ottawa S. Szpakowicz, University of Ottawa 05:00 Discussion 05:30 - 06:00 Break 06:00 - 08:00 Plenary Session (joint session with the other 7 symposia) Wednesday, March 25 =================== 09:00 - 10:30 Session 5 APPROACHES TO AND METHODS OF SUMMARIZATION 09:00 talk 1: "The generation of abstracts by selective analysis" Horacio Saggion, University of Montreal Guy Lapalme, University of Montreal 09:15 talk 2: "A Grounded Theory Approach to Expert Summarizing" Brigitte Endres-Niggemeyer, Polytechnic of Hannover 09:30 talk 3: "Text Summarization Based on Terminological Logics" Udo Hahn, Freiburg University Ulrich Reimer, Swiss Life 09:45 talk 4: "Connectionist Modeling of Human Event Memorization Processes with Application to Automatic Text Summarization" Maria Aretoulaki, University of Erlangen-Nurnberg Gabriele Scheler, TU Munich Wilfried Brauer, TU Munich 10:00 talk 5: "Summarization of Documents that Include Graphics" Robert Futrelle, Northeastern University 10:30 - 11:00 Break 11:00 - 12:30 Session 6 TEXT COMPACTION 11:00 talk 1: "Producing Intelligent Telegraphic Text Reduction to provide an Audio Scanning Service for the Blind" Gregory Grefenstette, Xerox Research Centre Europe 11:30 talk 2: "Dynamic Presentation of Document Content for Rapid On-Line Skimming" Branimir Boguraev, Apple Computer Christopher Kennedy, Northwestern University Rachel Bellamy, Apple Computer Sascha Brawer, University of Zurich Yin Yin Wong, Wong Design Jason Swartz, Apple Computer 12:00 Discussion and Closing