Call for Papers
Special Issue on Summarization
Information Processing and Management

Editor, Donna Harman


Summarization of text has a long history, starting with the desire to
automatically create abstracts or index terms for documents back in the
1960s.  There has been increased interest during the last ten years,
evidenced by the number of workshops that feature summarization.
Additionally the Document Understanding Conference (DUC) has focused on
summarization for five years now, with 31 participating groups in 2005
working on multidocument summarization to create an answer to a question.
Operational systems to summarize news exist, work is ongoing on speech
summarization, and some of the first cross-lingual summarization has been
implemented.  Several new methods for evaluation of summaries have been
explored recently, along with investigations into how summaries might (or
might not) improve efficiency in information processing.

This special issue is being created to reflect the current state-of-the-art
in diverse areas in summarization.  Some of the possible topics for papers
include:

      automatic abstract or title creation
      Single- and multiple-sentence compression and
          information fusion
      multi-document summarization
      cross-lingual summarization
      evaluation of summarization
      summarization for specific domains (news, genomics,
           legal, etc.)
      summarization for different genre and media (speech,
           emails, web, etc.)
      summarization for specific applications
           (question-answering, automatic report generation, etc.)
      operational summarization systems
      user studies involving summarization

Important dates:
     June 18, 2006  -- submission due
     September 17, 2006 -- notification to authors
     November 1, 2006 -- submission due for revised version

Papers should be submitted to the online site for IP & M
    http://ees.elsevier.com/ipm
with the submission box checked off that it is for the special issue on
summarization.  Instructions on formatting can also be found at the above
site.

For more information, contact
    Donna Harman
    National Institute of Standards and Technology
    100 Bureau Dr, Stop 8940
    Gaithersburg, Maryland, 20899-8940
    USA
    donna.harman@nist.gov