Information Retrieval List Digest 184 (October 18, 1993) URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/irld/irld-184 IRLIST Digest ISSN 1064-6965 October 18, 1993 Volume X, Number 40 Issue 184 ********************************************************** I. NOTICES A. Meeting Announcements/Calls for Papers 1. Text Retrieval Conference '94 (NIST) 2. IEEE Workshop on Visualization and Machine Vision '94 3. ACL '94 ********************************************************** I. NOTICES I.A.1. Fr: Donna Harman Re: Text Retrieval Conference '94 CALL FOR PARTICIPATION TEXT RETRIEVAL CONFERENCE January 1994 - November 1994 Conducted by: National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Sponsored by: Advanced Research Projects Agency Software and Intelligent Systems Technology Office (ARPA/SISTO) A new conference for examination of text retrieval methodologies (TREC) was held in November 1992 at Gaithersburg, Md. The goal of this conference was to encourage research in text retrieval from large document collections by providing a large test collection, uniform scoring procedures and a forum for organizations interested in comparing their results. Both ad-hoc queries against archival data collections and routing (filtering or dissemination) queries against incoming data streams were tested. The conference was a workshop open only to the 24 participating systems and government sponsors; however, the proceedings were published by NIST in the spring of 1993. A second workshop (TREC-2) was held in September 1993, with 31 participating systems, and proceedings to be published in the spring of 1994. This announcement serves as a call for participation from groups interested in working in the third year of this workshop (TREC-3). Participants will be expected to work with approximately million documents (2 gigabytes of data), retrieving lists of documents that could be considered relevant to each of 100 topics (50 routing and 50 adhoc topics). NIST will distribute the data and will collect and analyze the results. As before, the workshop will be open only to participating systems and government sponsors. Because of government cutbacks, there will be no financial support this year for participants. SCHEDULE: DEC. 1, 1993 -- deadline for participation applications JANURARY 1, 1994 -- acceptances announced, and training data distributed to new participants (including 3 CD-ROMS containing about 3 gigabytes of data, and 150 training topics and relevance judgments) JUNE 1, 1994 -- Test gigabyte of data distributed via CD-ROM, after routing queries received at NIST JULY 1, 1994 -- 50 new test topics distributed AUGUST 1, 1994 -- results from 50 routing queries and 50 test topics due at NIST OCTOBER 1, 1994 -- relevance judgments and individual evaluation scores due back to participants NOVEMBER 2-4 -- TREC-3 conference at NIST in Gaithersburg, Md. TASK DESCRIPTION: Participants will receive 3 gigabytes of data to use for training of their systems, including development of appropriate algorithms or knowledge bases. The 150 topics used in the first two TREC workshops, and the relevance judgments for these topics will also be sent. The topics are in the form of a highly-formatted user need statement (see attachment 1). Queries can either be constructed automatically from this topic description, or can be manually constructed. Two types of retrieval operations will be tested: a routing or filtering operation against new data, and an ad-hoc query operation against archival data. Fifty of the topics (numbers 101-150) initially distributed as training topics will be used by each participating group to create formalized routing or filtering queries to be used for retrieval against a new test gigabyte of data (disk 4). Fifty new test topics (151-200) will be used against 2 gigabytes of the training data (disks 2 and 3) as ad-hoc queries. Results from both types of queries (routing and ad-hoc) will be submitted to NIST as the top 1000 documents retrieved for each query. Participants creating queries both automatically and manually may submit both sets for evaluation. Scoring techniques including traditional recall/precision measures will be run for all systems and individual results will be returned to each participant. CONFERENCE FORMAT: The conference itself will be used as a forum both for presentation of results (including failure analyses and system comparisons), and for more lengthy system presentations describing retrieval techniques used, experiments run using the data, and other issues of interest to researchers in information retrieval. As there is a limited amount of time for these presentations, the program committee will determine which groups are asked to speak and which groups will present in a poster session. Additionally some organizations may not wish to describe their proprietary algorithms, and these groups may chose to participate in a different manner (see Category C). To allow a maximum number of participants, the following three categories have been established. CATEGORY A: FULL PARTICIPATION: Participants will be expected to work with the full data set, and to present full details of system algorithms and various experiments run using the data, either in a talk or in a poster session. In addition to algorithms and experiments, some information on time and effort statistics should be provided. This includes time for data preparation (such as indexing, building a manual thesaurus, building a knowledge base), time for construction of manual queries, query execution time, etc. More details on the desired content of the presentation will be provided later. CATEGORY B: EXPLORATORY GROUPS: Because small groups with novel retrieval techniques might like to participate but may have limited research resources, a category has been set up to work with only a subset of the data. This subset will consist of about 1/2 gigabyte of training data (and all training topics), and 1/4 gigabyte of test data (and all test topics). Participants in this category will be expected to follow the same schedule as category A, except with less data, and will be expected to present full details of system algorithms, experiments, and time and effort statistics either in a poster session or in a talk. CATEGORY C: EVALUATION ONLY Participants in this category will be expected to work on the full data set, submit results for common scoring and tabulation, and present their results in a poster session, including the time and effort statistics described in Category A. They will not be expected to describe their systems in detail. FOR COMPLETE INFORMATION, CONTACT: harman@magi.ncsl.nist.gov or Donna Harman, NIST, Building 225/A216, Gaithersburg, Md. 20899 FAX: 301-975-2128 ALL RESPONSES SHOULD BE SUBMITTED BY DEC. 1, 1993 TO THE PROGRAM CHAIR, DONNA HARMAN. AS NOTED ABOVE, EMAIL IS THE DESIRED FORM OF COMMUNICATION. ********** I.A.2. Fr: A. Ravishankar Rao Re: Workshop on Visualization and Machine Vision CALL FOR PAPERS IEEE Workshop on Visualization and Machine Vision The Westin Hotel, Seattle, Washington June 24, 1994 (Note: The workshop is a day after CVPR at the same site. So researchers can stay an extra day and attend the workshop). Sponsored by IEEE Computer Society: Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence Technical Committee and Computer Graphics Technical Committee Visualization is a rapidly growing discipline, and has become one of the most important tools of modern computational science. The goal of research in visualization is to extract meaningful information from voluminous datasets through the use of imaging and interactive graphics. This goal has been made feasible by recent advancements in multi-media technology. Computer Vision, on the other hand, is concerned with the automatic interpretation of images. Thus, both disciplines are concerned with computational problems associated with images. The aim of this workshop is to explore the synergy between these two research areas and identify new applications and promising new directions for interdisciplinary research. Some examples of such applications are: automated analysis of flow visualization images, fusion of multiple images and visualization of medical images. In many such applications, computer vision may be used to aid and complement human analysis. For example, computer vision may be applied for selective visualization, where the image display is preceded by image analysis to isolate regions of interest in the data. Such regions of interest could be edges in data, or areas around singularities. Techniques such as edge detection and segmentation could be extended to data that are not necessarily visual, e.g. financial or geographic data. Computer vision could benefit from techniques developed in visualization, such as the fusion of multiple images for display, visualization of reconstruction techniques, display of multi- dimensional vector fields, etc. We invite both theoretical and application oriented papers exploring any aspect of the interaction between these two disciplines. Suggested topics are listed below. This list is not exhaustive and other relevant papers are welcome. SUGGESTED TOPICS Fusion of multiple images Geographical data analysis Flow visualization Medical Imaging Financial data analysis Image databases Multimedia techniques Integration of multiple views Marine imaging Interactive segmentation Visualization of reconstruction techniques Evaluation of visualization techniques 3-d in segmentation for visualization Analysis of test and measurement data Quantitative machine vision techniques PAPER SUBMISSION Four copies of complete manuscript should be received by December 13, 1993 at the address: A. Ravishankar Rao, IBM Research, P.O. Box 218, Yorktown Heights, NY 10598, USA. Please include the following (a) A title page containing the names and addresses of the authors (including e-mail), and abstract of up to 200 words. (b) A second page with title and abstract only (no author names). (c) Paper -- limited to 25 double spaced pages (12 points, 1 inch margins). FOR COMPLETE INFORMATION, CONTACT: PROGRAM CHAIR A. Ravishankar Rao IBM Research P.O. Box 218 Yorktown Hts. NY 10598 rao@watson.ibm.com ********** I.A.3. Fr: Don Walker Re: ACL-94 CALL FOR PAPERS ACL-94 CALL FOR PAPERS 32nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics 27 June - 1 July 1994 New Mexico State University Las Cruces, New Mexico, USA TOPICS OF INTEREST: Papers are invited on substantial, original, and unpublished research on all aspects of computational linguistics, including, but not limited to, pragmatics, discourse, semantics, syntax, and the lexicon; phonetics, phonology, and morphology; interpreting and generating spoken and written language; linguistic, mathematical, and psychological models of language; language-oriented information retrieval; corpus-based language modeling; machine translation and translation aids; natural language interfaces and dialogue systems; message and narrative understanding systems; and theoretical and applications papers of every kind. REQUIREMENTS: Papers should describe unique work; they should emphasize completed work rather than intended work; and they should indicate clearly the state of completion of the reported results. A paper accepted for presentation at the ACL Meeting cannot be presented or have been presented at any other meeting with publicly available published proceedings. Papers that are being submitted to other conferences must reflect this fact on the title page. FORMAT FOR SUBMISSION: Authors should submit preliminary versions of their papers, not to exceed 3200 words (exclusive of references). Papers outside the specified length and formatting requirements are subject to rejection without review. Papers should be headed by a title page containing the paper title, a short (5 line) summary and a specification of the subject area. Since reviewing will be ``blind'', the title page of the paper should omit author names and addresses. Furthermore, self-references that reveal the authors' identity (e.g., ``We previously showed (Smith, 1991) . . .'') should be avoided. Instead, use references like ``Smith previously showed (1991) . . '' To identify each paper, a separate identification page should be supplied, containing the paper's title, the name(s) of the author(s), complete addresses, a short (5 line) summary, a word count, and a specification of the topic area. SUBMISSION MEDIA: Papers should be submitted electronically or in hard copy to the Program Chair: James Pustejovsky +1-617-736-2709 Brandeis University +1-617-736-2741 fax Computer Science, Ford Hall Waltham, MA 02254, USA jamesp@cs.brandeis.edu Electronic submissions should be either self-contained LaTeX source or plain text. LaTeX submissions must use the ACL submission style (aclsub.sty) retrievable from the ACL LISTSERV server (access to which is described below) and should not refer to any external files or styles except for the standard styles for TeX 3.14 and LaTeX 2.09. A model submission modelsub.tex is also provided in the archive, as well as a bibliography style acl.bst. (Note however that the bibliography for a submission cannot be submitted as separate .bib file; the actual bibliography entries must be inserted in the submitted LaTeX source file.) Hard copy submissions should consist of four (4) copies of the paper and one (1) copy of the identification page. For both kinds of submissions, if at all possible, a plain text version of the identification page should be sent separately by electronic mail, using the following format: title: author: <name of first author> address: <address of first author> ... author: <name of last author> address: <address of last author> abstract: < abstract> content areas: <first area>, ..., <last area> word count: SCHEDULE: Authors must submit their papers by 6 January 1994. Late papers will not be considered. Notification of receipt will be mailed to the first author (or designated author) soon after receipt. Authors will be notified of acceptance by 15 March 1994. Camera-ready copies of final papers prepared in a double-column format, preferably using a laser printer, must be received by 1 May 1994, along with a signed copyright release statement. The ACL LaTeX proceedings format is available through the ACL LISTSERV. CONFERENCE INFORMATION: The Local Arrangements Committee is chaired by: Janyce M. Wiebe +1-50+1-505-646-6228 New Mexico State University +1-505-646-6218 (fax) Computing Research Laboratory PO Box 30001/3CRL Las Cruces, NM 88003, USA wiebe@nmsu.edu ACL LISTSERV: LISTSERV is a facility to allow access to an electronic document archive by electronic mail. The ACL LISTSERV has been set up at Columbia University's Department of Computer Science. Requests from the archive should be sent as e-mail messages to listserv@cs.columbia.edu with an empty subject field and the message body containing the request command. The most useful requests are "help" for general help on using LISTSERV, "index acl-l" for the current contents of the ACL archive and "get acl-l <file>" to get a particular file named <file> from the archive. For example, to get an ACL membership form, a message with the following body should be sent: get acl-l membership-form.txt Answers to requests are returned by e-mail. Since the server may have many requests for different archives to process, requests are queued up and may take a while (say, overnight) to be fulfilled. The ACL archive can also be accessed by anonymous FTP. Here is an example of how to get the same file by FTP (user typein is underlined): $ ftp cs.columbia.edu ------------------- Name (cs.columbia.edu:pereira): anonymous --------- Password:pereira@research.att.com << not echoed ------------------------ ftp> cd acl-l -------- ftp> get membership-form.txt.Z ------------------------- ftp> quit ---- $ uncompress membership-form.txt.Z -------------------------------- ********************************************************** IRLIST Digest is distributed from the University of California, Division of Library Automation, 300 Lakeside Drive, Oakland, CA. 94612-3550. Send subscription requests to: LISTSERV@UCCVMA.BITNET Send submissions to IRLIST to: IR-L@UCCVMA.BITNET Editorial Staff: Clifford Lynch calur@uccmvsa.ucop.edu or calur@uccmvsa.bitnet Nancy Gusack ncgur@uccmvsa.bitnet or ncgur@uccmvsa.ucop.edu Mary Engle meeur@uccmvsa.bitnet The IRLIST Archives is now set up for anonymous FTP, as well as via the LISTSERV. Using anonymous FTP via the host dla.ucop.edu, the files will be found in the directory pub/irl, stored in subdirectories by year (e.g., /pub/irl/1993). Using LISTSERV, send the message INDEX IR-L to LISTSERV@UCCVMA.BITNET. To get a specific issue listed in the Index, send the message GET IR-L LOGYYMM, where YY is the year and MM is the numeric month in which the issue was mailed, to LISTSERV@UCCVMA (Bitnet) or LISTSERV@UCCVMA.UCOP.EDU. You will receive the issues for the entire month you have requested. These files are not to be sold or used for commercial purposes. Contact Nancy Gusack or Mary Engle for more information on IRLIST. THE OPINIONS EXPRESSED IN IRLIST DO NOT REPRESENT THOSE OF THE EDITORS OR THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. AUTHORS ASSUME FULL RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE CONTENTS OF THEIR SUBMISSIONS TO IRLIST.