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MultiLing 2013 - Multilingual Multi-document Summarization
Second Call for Systems/Participation

August 9th, 2013
ACL 2013, Sofia, Bulgaria
http://multiling.iit.demokritos.gr/pages/view/662/multiling-2013

Overview
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MultiLing 2013 is a workshop, held within ACL 2013, which covers three
sub-domains of Natural Language Processing, focused on the multilingual aspect
of summarization: multi-document summarization, summarization evaluation
and data collection.

The MultiLing 2013 workshop builds upon the Text Analysis
Conference (TAC) MultiLing Pilot task of 2011, where systems were asked to
generate fluent, representative summaries (around 250 words) for each of
a set of predefined topics per language.

This year each topic is described by 10 source documents. The set of documents
is in one of the following languages: Arabic, Chinese, Czech, English, French,
Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Romanian and Spanish.

Based on the challenges revealed in MultiLing 2011, this year we
also address the problems of multilingual summary evaluation and data collection.
We also conduct a pilot task for single document summarization.

This call asks for systems to participate and compete in the MultiLing 2013 tracks.
You can find information on how to participate at the end of this document.


Introduction
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MultiLing 2013 aims to encourage research on multilingual summarization, by
providing a corpus in various languages, common evaluation procedures and a
forum for participants to present their results.

This call invites you to participate in the MultiLing 2013 Workshop tracks.
MultiLing 2013 organizers will provide suitable corpora for each track.
MultiLing 2013 has two main tracks and a pilot:

  1) Multilingual multi-document summarization
  2) Multilingual summary evaluation
  3) (Pilot) Multilingual single document summarization

Tracks and Tasks Detailed
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Track 1: Multilingual multi-document summarization
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The multilingual multi-document summarization track aims to evaluate the
application of (partially or fully) language-independent summarization
algorithms on a variety of languages. Each system participating in the track
will be called to provide summaries for a range of different languages,
based on a news corpus.  Participating systems will be required to
apply their methods to a minimum of two languages.
Evaluation will favor systems that apply their methods to more languages.

The corpus used in the Multilingual multi-document summarization track
will be based on WikiNews texts (http://www.wikinews.org/). Source
texts will be UTF-8, clean texts (without any mark-up, images,etc.).

The task requires systems to generate a single, fluent, representative
summary from a set of documents describing an event sequence. The language of
the document set will be within a given range of languages and all documents
in a set share the same language. The output summary should be of the same
language as its source documents. The output summary should be 250 words at
most.

Track 2: Multilingual summary evaluation
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This track aims to examine how well automated systems can evaluate summaries
from different languages. The task offers as input the summaries generated
from automatic systems and humans in the Multilingual multi-document
summarization task. The output of evaluating systems, should be a grading
of the summaries. Ideally, we would want the automatic evaluation to maximally
correlate to human judgment. Human judgments will be provided by the
organizers, thanks to the co-operating Contributors.

The corpus of the Multilingual summary evaluation will consist of
gold (human) summaries and the automatic system summaries output from
the Multilingual multi-document summarization task.

Pilot: Multilingual single document summarization
----------------------------------------------------------------
This pilot aims to measure the ability of automated systems to apply
single document summarization, in the context of Wikipedia texts.
Given a single encyclopedic entry, possibly with several sections/subsection,
describing a specific subject, the systems will be requested to provide
a summary covering the main points of the entry (similarly to the lead section
of a Wikipedia page). The corpus will consist of (non-parallel) documents in
over 40 languages. Participating systems will be required to
apply their methods to a minimum of two languages.
Evaluation will favor systems that apply their methods to more languages.

The pilot corpus will be based on selected texts from Wikipedia. Details
will follow in the MultiLing 2013 website (http://multiling.iit.demokritos.gr/)

Roadmap:
=======================================
Please check the roadmap page on the MultiLing website:
http://bit.ly/16ms5lr

How to apply as a Participant:
================================================================
Enter your information by *May 20th, 2013* at the following web form:
http://bit.ly/11dpWJx

If you have problems or questions, please contact George Giannakopoulos
(ggianna @ iit.demokritos.gr) directly.


Program Committee Members

 The Program Committee members are:

• Hoa Trang Dang - NIST
• Lucy Vanderwende - Microsoft
• Horacio Saggion - Universitat Pompeu Fabra
• Vangelis Karkaletsis - NCSR Demokritos
• Karolina Owczarzak - Oracle
• John Conroy - IDA Center for Computing Sciences
• George Giannakopoulos - NCSR Demokritos

Data Contributors

• Lei Li - Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications (BUPT), China
• Corina Forascu - Romanian Academy Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (RACAI), Romania and Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iasi (UAIC), Romania
• Jeff Kubina, John Conroy, Judith Shleshinger - IDA/Center for Computing Sciences, USA
• Sabino Miranda - Center for Computing Research, Instituto Politécnico Nacional, Mexico
• Michael Elhadad - Department of Computer Science, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel
  (Many thanks to Marina Litvak - Sami Shamoon College of Engineering, Israel, for her active support related to the Hebrew language.)
• Mahmoud El-Haj - Lancaster University, UK
• Ans Alghamdi, Essex University, UK
• Maha Althobaiti, Essex University, UK
• Ahmad Alharthi, King Saud University, Saudi Arabia
• Josef Steinberger - University of West Bohemia, Czech Republic
• Georgios Petasis, George Giannakopoulos - NCSR "Demokritos", Greece