Proceedings of the ACL-2000 workshop on Recent advances in natural language processing and information retrieval held in conjunction with the 38th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics -

Abstract

This volume contains the papers presented at the workshop on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval, held on 8 October 2000 in conjunction with the 38 th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL).The aim of the workshop was to foster the interaction between researchers in the areas of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Information Retrieval (IR), and furthermore, to promote discussion on the current and potential benefits of common approaches to related research challenges. In putting the workshop together, our goal was to bring these two communities together to establish opportunity for communication. We hope there will be similar workshops at IR related conferences so that a gradual closing of the existing gaps will occur. This workshop is not the first on the topic, but one which reflects what we believe are increasing trends as each field reaches its limits.The growing research and application possibilities provided by the increased amount of networked information have motivated new attempts to explore the relationship between NLP and IR. For researchers in IR, a compelling challenge is to move from (monolingual) document retrieval within controlled text collections, to actually retrieving information, rather than individual documents, from multilingual, heterogeneous and dynamic webs of interlinked documents and online services. The reciprocal challenge for NLP research is to scale up, adapt and possibly reshape techniques and resources to help bridge the gap between document and information retrieval in practical applications.The central topic of the workshop was the application of language technologies to information retrieval, including•the role of lexical-syntactic information in mono- and multilingual IR, including morphology, phrase detection and treatment, word sense disambiguation adapted to IR needs, acquisition and use of lexical resources, etc.•empirical evidence regarding the use of NL techniques in different retrieval scenarios, typification of such scenarios, and the discussion of evaluation measures beyond precision/recall variants.•interaction between NLP and IR techniques in topics related to both areas such as Cross-Language and Interactive Text Retrieval, Question Answering, Information Extraction, Text Summarization, Text Data Mining, etc.The original call for papers resulted in 25 submissions, from which 10 papers were selected on the basis of a thorough reviewing process. A majority of the papers contained in this volume study how to improve retrieval processes using syntactic and semantic information, including lexical expansions for web querying, semantic indexing, phrasal indexing in different languages, acquisition and use of lexical databases, etc. The remaining papers combine NL techniques from related areas - summarization, information extraction - to extend search capabilities and presentation of results, including summarization of search engine hit lists and summarization for text categorization, and a search interface that accepts template-like general constraints and is able to return specific information items such as locations, people or companies that satisfy user's constraints. Although none of these papers deal directly with cross-language issues (well covered in the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum held at Lisbon two weeks earlier), the monolingual systems presented here cover five different languages (English, Japanese, Korean, Italian and Czech).