News:

(2019-02-05) MultiLing accepted as a RANLP 2019 workshop.

Main Info:

Multiling 2019 is an accepted RANLP 2019 workshop and will take place at the 5th or 6th of September at Varna, Bulgaria (finalization pending).

MultiLing 2019 covers a variety of topics on Natural Language Processing, focused on the multi-lingual aspect of summarization, but also its value across different settings:

Multilingual summarization across genres and sources:

Summarization has been receiving increasing attention during the last years. This is mostly due to the increasing volume and redundancy of available online information but also due to the user created content. Recently, more and more interest arises for methods that will be able to function on a variety of languages and across different types of content and genres (news, social media, transcripts).

This topic of research is mapped to different community tasks, covering different genres and
source types: Multilingual single-document summarization [Giannakopoulos et al., 2015]; news
headline generation (new task in MultiLing 2019); financial narrative summarization (new task
in MultiLing 2019, under a view of synergy and complementary to other workshops as in FNP
2018 at LREC’18 [El-Haj et al., 2018]); user-supplied comments summarization (OnForumS
task [Kabadjov et al., 2015]); conversation transcripts summarization (see also [Favre et al.,
2015]). The spectrum of the tasks covers a variety of real settings, identifying individual re-
quirements and intricacies, similarly to previous MultiLing endeavours [Giannakopoulos et al.,
2011, Giannakopoulos, 2013, Elhadad et al., 2013, Giannakopoulos et al., 2015, Giannakopoulos
et al., 2017].

Multilingual summary evaluation:

Summary evaluation has been an open question for several years, even though there exist methods that correlate well to human judgement, when called upon to compare systems. In the multilingual setting, it is not obvious that these methods will perform equally well to the English language setting. In fact, some preliminary results have shown that several problems may arise in the multilingual setting [Giannakopoulos et al., 2011].

The same challenges arise across different source types and genres. This section of the workshop
aims to cover and discuss these research problems and corresponding solutions.

Community tasks:

MultiLing is supported by a number of community tasks (check the related links on the top menu of the website for information on previous runs). This year we plan to implement 3 main tasks:

• Headline generation
• Financial narrative summarization
• Summary evaluation

Stay tuned for more information on the tasks.

Programme Committee Members: (to be finalized)

 John M. Conroy - IDA Center for Computing Sciences
 Marina Litvak - Sami Shamoon College of Engineering
 Udo Kruschwitz - University of Essex
 Horacio Saggion - Universitat Pompeu Fabra
 Elena Lloret - University of Alicante
 Vangelis Karkaletsis - NCSR Demokritos
 Mark Last - Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
 Natalia Vanetik - Sami Shamoon College of Engineering; Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
 Josef Steinberger - University of West Bohemia
 Laura Plaza - UNED
 Florian Boudin - University of Nantes
 Iraklis Varlamis - Harokopio University
 George Petasis - NCSR Demokritos
 Peter Rankel - Stratus Solutions
 George Giannakopoulos - NCSR Demokritos
 Mahmoud El-Haj - Lancaster University
 Ahmet Aker - University of Sheffield
 Giuseppe Riccardi - University of Trento