NAACL-ANLP 2000 Workshop on Automatic summarization -

Abstract

Automatic summarization aims at producing a concise, condensed representation of the key information content in an information source for a particular user and task. Interest in automatic summarization continues to grow, motivated by the explosion of on-line information sources and advances in natural language processing and information retrieval. In fact, some form of automatic summarization may be indispensable given the massive information universes that lie ahead in the 21 st century.The problem of automatic summarization poses a variety of tough challenges in both NL understanding and generation. A spate of recent papers and tutorials on this subject at conferences such as ACL/EACL, AAAI, ECAI, IJCAI, and SIGIR point to a growing interest in research in this field. Several commercial summarization products have,also' appeared. There have been several workshops in the past on this subject: in Dagstuhl (1994), Madrid (1997), and Stanford (1998). It is our great pleasure to bring the fourth such event to you.While the field continues to progress, there are also many problems that need to be addressed before the promises of automatic text summarization can be fully realized. The papers included in this volume present a snapshot of recent progress in solving some of the problems: concept identification, identification of discourse markers, multi-document summarization, content visualization, evaluation, and use. Out of 29 submissions to the workshop, 10 are included in these proceedings.