PREFACE
Welcome to the HLT/NAACL 2003 Workshop on Text Summarization. It
has been nine years since the first summarization workshop (in Dagstuhl in
1994); interest in summarization within the natural language processing and
the information retrieval communities has been high ever since, leading to a
succession of highly successful summarization workshops such as
ACL/EACL 1997 (Madrid), the AAAI Spring Symposium 1998 (Stanford),
ANLP/NAACL 2000 (Seattle), NAACL 2001 (Pittsburgh), SIGIR/DUC
2001 (New Orleans), and ACL/DUC 2002 (Philadelphia).
This is the second time that the workshop is run in a two-day format jointly
with the Document Understanding Conference (DUC), an ongoing text
summarization evaluation effort sponsored by the DARPA TIDES program.
The first day of the workshop will include presentations of 10 original
scientific papers covering diverse areas of the summarization research
spectrum. The papers were selected from 13 submitted papers and include
several new approaches to summary evaluation, new applications such as
summarization of OCR'ed material, a survey of user requirements of
summaries, and a new technique using compression for summarization.
These papers are published in the present proceedings.
The second day of the workshop focuses on the large-scale, competitive
evaluation effort DUC. These papers are published in Volume II.
This workshop would not be possible without the hard work of the authors,
the DUC participants and the reviewers. We would like to thank HLT and
NAACL for hosting the workshop and DARPA for sponsoring the DUC
evaluation. And finally we would like to thank the program committee for
helping assemble this excellent program. We would finally like to thank two
people in person: Eduard Hovy, the general conference chair and Dekang
Lin, the local arrangements chair. Without their commitment to the
conference, this workshop might not have happened.
We hope you enjoy the workshop.
Drago and Simone, workshop co-chairs
