Task-Focused Summarization and Question Answering Workshop

July 23, 2006, Sydney, Australia


8:30-8:40     welcome and introduction

8:40-9:05     Dimensionality Reduction Aids Term Co-Occurrence Based
              Multi-Document Summarization
              Ben Hachey, Gabriel Murray, and David Reiter
9:05-9:30     Challenges in Evaluating Summaries of Short Stories
              Anna Kazantseva and Stan Szpakowicz

9:30-10:30    invited talk, Scenario-based Question Answering
              Sanda Harabagiu, Language Computer Corporation

Scenario-Based Question Answering

When faced with a task described by a complex scenario, users ask questions 
that are motivated by the need to explore complex relationships.  These questions 
test the capabilities of Q/A systems to (1) tackle complex requests; (2) take 
into account the scenario context; and (3) enable a coherent dialogue with the user. 

In this talk I shall describe our experience with Ferret, our interactive Q/A system, 
within several experiments that involved multiple scenarios and a varied number of 
users. I shall present the lessons learned and focus on the most challenging problems.


10:30-10:50 coffee

10:50-11:15     Question Pre-Processing in a QA System on Internet
                Discussion Groups
                Chuan-Jie Lin and Chun-Hung Cho
11:15-11:40     Situated Question Answering in the Clinical Domain:
                Selecting the Best Drug Treatment for Diseases
                Dina Demner-Fushman and Jimmy Lin
11:40-12:05     Contextual Entailment - Using Scenario Knowledge in
                Question Answering
                Sanda Harabagiu and Andrew Hickl
12:05-12:30     Automating Help-desk Responses: A Comparative Study of
                Information-gathering Approaches
                Ingrid Zukerman and Yuval Marom

12:15-2:00      lunch

2:-2:25         DUC 2005: Evaluation of Question-Focused Summarization Systems
                Hoa Trang Dang
2:25-3:30       Panel, evaluation programs
                Hoa Trang Dang (NIST), Noriko Kando (NTCIR), Ed Hovy (USC/ISI)

3:30-4          coffee

4-5:30     Multilingual Summarization Evaluation 2006
       4-4:30        presentation of results, John Conroy
       4:30-5:10     2 invited presentations from participants (tbd)
       5:10-5:30     discussion of Multilingual Summarization