2003 International Symposium on

Reference Resolution and Its Applications to
Question Answering and Summarization


The ARQAS Conference will be held at the University Ca' Foscari - Venice (It), 23 - 24 June, 2003.
It is directed to research people working in the area of computational linguistics, mathematical and quantitative linguistics, corpus linguistics and language engineering.

The official language of the conference is English.

Reference resolution algorithms are applicable for the processing of discourse and dialogue and more recently became important tools for textual Questions Answering (QA) systems or Summarization systems.
The objective of this Symposium is to bring together researchers whose work focuses on the resolution of reference in natural language and to create a forum for the presentation and discussion of their current results.
We are especially interested in the application of reference resolution to Questions Answering and Summarization and welcome papers and discussions that tackle the interactions of reference resolution with these two NLP applications.
The range of topics to be covered will include:

  • new reference resolution algorithms
  • reference resolution and its contribution to discourse processing
  • new methods for single and multi-document summarization
  • recent findings in the theory and practice of textual question answering
  • theories and formalisms for reference resolution
  • empirical methods in reference resolution
  • applications of reference resolution
  • multilingual and multidocument reference resolution
  • evaluation of reference resolution
  • resources used for reference resolution
  • reference resolution for factual questions answering
  • reference resolution for summarization
  • reference resolution for dialog processing
  • reference resolution for the identification of disourse relations and discourse structure

    • The Symposium is organized by Sanda Harabagiu, University of Texas - Dallas, and Rodolfo Delmonte, Universita' Ca' Foscari - Venezia.

    PROGRAM COMMITTEE

    Regina Barzilay, MIT/Cornell University
    Donna Byron, Ohio State University
    Nicoletta Calzolari, University of Pisa
    Claire Cardie, Cornell University
    Dan Cristea, University of Iasi
    Rodolfo Delmonte, Ca' Foscari University
    Carol Van Ess-Dykema, DoD
    Antonio Ferrández, University of Alicante
    Udo Hahn, University of Freiburg
    Sanda Harabagiu, University of Texas, Dallas
    Graeme Hirst, University of Toronto
    Jerry Hobbs, USC/ISI
    Nancy Ide, Vassar College
    Steve Maiorano, University of Sheffield
    Ruslan Mitkov, University of Wolverhampton
    Massimo Poesio, University of Essex
    Bonnie Webber, University of Edinburgh


    LOCAL ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

    Rodolfo Delmonte
    Dario Bianchi
    Antonella Bristot
    Sara Tonelli
    Ciprian Bacalu
    Luminita Chiran
    Rachele de Nicola
    Marco Piccolino

    PRESIDENT: Rodolfo Delmonte - Universita' di Venezia


    For more information mail to: Rodolfo Delmonte.