CALL FOR WORKSHOP PAPERS ACL 2003 Post-conference Workshop Sapporo Convention Center, Sapporo, Japan July 11-12, 2003 Workshop on "Multilingual Summarization and Question Answering - Machine Learning and Beyond" Automatic summarization and question answering aim at producing a concise, condensed representation of the key information content in an information source for a particular user and task. Interest in automati= c summarization and question answering continues to grow, motivated by th= e explosion of on-line information sources and advances in natural language processing and information retrieval. In fact, various forms o= f automatic summarization and question answering will undoubtedly be indispensable given the massive information universes that lie ahead in= the 21st century. Summarization and question answering involves the extraction or generation of text snippets to fulfill some user needs. Rule-based or statistical-based summarization and QA systems have shown promising results in the TREC QA-tracks, NTCIR QAC, and NIST DUC; it is, however,= very difficult to find good evaluation functions or rules that work wel= l across domains or in all questions because there are many system parameters that must be carefully tuned in order to achieve good system= performance. In consequence, various machine learning (ML) techniques have recently been applied to summarization and QA systems. The purpose of this workshop is to provide a forum for exploring the commonality underling this diversity of problem domain and approaches. The workshop has the following goals: - to bring together communities of researchers who apply machine learning techniques to summarization and QA systems, - to deepen the summarization and QA community's understanding of the state of the art in machine learning, - to identify summarization and QA-related problems for which ML techniques might be appropriate, and - to advance the state of the art of summarization and QA technologies. Topics appropriate to this workshop include: - summarization or QA systems with ML techniques, - novel or improved ML techniques for summarization or QA, - effective feature extraction methods for characterizing summarization or QA, - metrics and benchmarks for evaluating the effect of machine learning techniques in summarization or QA systems, - generation for summarization or QA, - cross-language or multilingual QA, - integration with Web and IR access, - corpora creation for summarization or QA, - interfaces and tools for summarization or QA. FORMAT FOR SUBMISSIONS Submissions are limited to original, unpublished work. Submissions must= use the ACL latex style or Microsoft Word style MSQA-submission.doc (both available from the here workshop web page). 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 t= o be rejected without review. The paper should be written in English. SUBMISSION QUESTIONS Please send submission questions to Abraham Ittycheriah (abei@us.ibm.co= m). SUBMISSION PROCEDURE Electronic submission only: send the pdf (preferred), postscript, or MS= Word form of your submission to: abei@us.ibm.com (Abraham Ittycheriah) = The Subject line should be "ACL2003 WORKSHOP PAPER SUBMISSION". Because reviewing i= s 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: "ACL2003 WORKSHOP ID PAGE" and must include title, all authors, theme area, 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: =A0Apr 21, 2003 Notification of acceptance for papers: =A0May 19, 2003 Camera ready papers due: =A0May 26, 2003 Workshop date: =A0July 11-12, 2003 PROGRAM CHAIRS Abraham Ittycheriah IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, USA Tsuneaki Kato University of Tokyo, Japan Chin-Yew Lin USC/ISI, USA Yutaka Sasaki NTT Communication Science Laboratories, Japan PROGRAM COMMITTEE Regina Barzilay Columbia University, USA Jason Chang National Tsin-Hua University, Taiwan Hsin-Hsi Chen National Taiwan University, Taiwan Jennifer Chu-Carroll IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, USA Udo Hahn University of Freiburg, Germany Sanda Harabagiu Univ. of Texas, Dallas, USA Donna Harman NIST, USA Ulf Hermjakob USC/ISI, USA Jerry Hobbs USC/ISI, USA Inderjeet Mani MITRE Corp. USA Junichi Fukumoto Ritsumeikan University, Japan Gary Geunbae Lee Postech, South Korea Hideki Isozaki NTT Communication Science Laboratories, Japan Sadao Kurohashi University of Tokyo, Japan Hang Li Microsoft Research Asia, China Dekang Lin University of Alberta, Canada Bernardo Magnini Istituto Trentino di Cultura (ITC)/IRST, Italy Shigeru Masuyama Toyohashi University of Technology, Japan Dan Moldovan Univ. of Texas, Dallas, USA Tatsunori Mori Yokohama National University, Japan Hwee Tou Ng National University of Singapore, Singapore Manabu Okumura Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan John Prager IBM Research, USA Drago Radev University of Michigan, USA Dan Roth University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign, USA Satoshi Sekine New York University, USA Karen Sparck-Jones Cambridge University, UK Tomek Strzalkowski State University of New York, Albany, USA Ingrid Zukerman Monash University, Australia