Multi-source Multilingual Information Extraction and Summarization Workshop to be held in conjunction with *** RANLP 2007 *** Borovets - Bulgaria http://lml.bas.bg/ranlp2007/ *** 26th of September 2007 *** First Call for Papers Information extraction (IE) and text summarization (TS) are key technologies aiming at extracting relevant information from texts and other sources and presenting the information to the user in condensed forms. Recent years have witnessed an explosion of information, making IE and TS particularly important for the information society. These technologies, however, face new challenges with the adoption of the Web 2.0 paradigm (e.g. blogs, wikis) because of their inherent multi-source nature. These technologies have to deal no longer with isolated texts or single narratives but with large scale repositories, or sources -- in one or many languages -- containing a multiplicity of views, opinions, or commentaries on particular topics, entities or events. There is thus a need to adapt and/or develop new techniques to deal with these new phenomena. Recognising similar information across different sources and/or in different languages is of paramount importance in this multi-source, multi-lingual context, in particular the ability to detect paraphrases in texts is relevant here. In information extraction, merging information from multiple sources can lead to increased accuracy relative to extraction from single sources. In text summarization, similar facts found across sources can inform sentence scoring algorithms. In question answering, the distribution of answers in similar contexts can inform answer ranking components. In occasions, it is not the similarity of information that matters, but its complementary nature. In a multi-lingual context, information extraction and text summarization can provide solutions for cross-lingual access: key pieces of information can be extracted from different texts in one or many languages, merged, and then conveyed in many natural languages in concise forms. It is therefore important that the research community addresses the following issues: ** What methods are appropriate to detect similar/complementary/contradictory information? Are hand-crafted rules and knowledge-rich approaches convenient? ** What methods are there to tackle cross-document and cross-lingual entity and event coreference? ** What machine learning approaches are most appropriate for this task supervised/unsupervised/semi-supervised? What type of corpora is required for training and testing? ** What techniques are appropriate to produce condensed synthesis of the extracted information? What generation techniques are useful here? What kind of techniques can be used to cross domains and languages? ** What tools are there to support multi-lingual/multi-source access to information? What solutions are there beyond full document translation to produce cross-lingual summaries? The objective of the workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners in the areas of extraction, summarization, and other information access technologies to discuss recent approaches to deal with multi-source and multi-lingual challenges. We welcome submission concerning the following topics: * Multi-source information extraction * Cross-document Cross-lingual coreference * Opinion mining and synthesis * Multi-lingual information extraction * Cross-lingual Summarization * Tools to support information fusion * Paraphrase identification and generation * Adaptable IE-based text generation Important Dates: Deadline for submission: *** June 15, 2007 *** Notification of acceptance: July 25, 2007 Camera-ready copy due: August 31, 2007 Workshop: September 26, 2007 Submission guidelines: Submissions should be A4, two-column format and should not exceed seven pages, including cover page, figures, tables and references. Times New Roman 12 font is preferred. The first page should state the title of the paper, the author's name(s), affiliation, surface and email address(es), followed by keywords and an abstract and continue with the first section of your paper. Guidelines for producing camera-ready versions will be available at the conference web site. Each paper will be reviewed by up to three members of the program committee. Authors of accepted papers will receive guidelines regarding how to produce camera-ready versions of their papers for inclusion in the proceedings. Organization Thierry Poibeau (CNRS - LIPN, U. Paris 13 - France) E-mail: Thierry.Poibeau@lipn.univ-paris13.fr Horacio Saggion (NLP Group, U. Sheffield - United Kingdom) E-mail: saggion@dcs.shef.ac.uk Program Committee: Sophia Ananiadou (U. Manchester, UK) Roberto Basili (U. Roma Tor Vergata, Italy) Kalina Bontcheva (U. Sheffield, UK) Nathalie Colineau (CSIRO, Australia) Nigel Collier (NII, Japan) Hercules Dalianis (KTH/Stockholm University, Sweden) Thierry Declerck (DFKI, Germany) Brigitte Grau (LIMSI, France) Kentaro Inui (NAIST, Japan) Min-Yen Kan (National University of Singapore, Singapore) Guy Lapalme (U. Montreal, Canada) Diana Maynard (U. Sheffield, UK) Jean-Luc Minel (CNRS - Modyco, France) Constantin Orasan (University of Wolverhampton, UK) Cecile Paris (CSIRO, Australia) Agnes Sandor (Xerox XRCE, France) Ralf Steinberger (European Commission - Joint Research Centre, Italy) Stan Szpakowicz (University of Ottawa, Canada) Lucy Vanderwende (Microsoft Research, USA) Jose Luis Vicedo (University of Alicante, Spain) Roman Yangarber (University of Helsinki, Finland) Liang Zhou (ISI, USA) Michael Zock (LIF, France) Paper Submission: Details on how to submit your paper will be announced in due time.