Schedule of Events: Workshops

Title: Workshop on Operational Text Classification Systems 2001

Organizers:

• David D. Lewis, independent consultant (Chair)
• Susan Dumais, Microsoft
• Ronen Feldman, Clearforest
• Fabrizio Sebastiani, Italian National Council of Research

Expected audience:

Builders, maintainers, and users of text classification systems, as well as researchers interested in advancing the state of the art in text classification.

Description:

Our goal is to expose researchers and practitioners to the challenges of building and fielding operational text classification systems. Application areas of interest include controlled vocabulary indexing, organization of Web site content, alerting and routing of news, email and Web filtering, help desk automation, text mining, and many others. Both the automated assignment of textual data to classes, and the automated discovery of such classes (by techniques such as clustering) are of interest.

Workshop topics will include (but are not limited to):

• Cost effectiveness of automating text classification
• Understanding user needs
• Technical and personnel issues in using training data and prior knowledge
• Trading off space, time, and other resources in classification
• Integrating text classification with other software and procedures
• Maintaining and monitoring effectiveness
• Discovering, defining, and updating classes and classifiers

For more information, see the workshop home page at http://www.DavidDLewis.com/events/otc2001

PARTICIPATION

To facilitate discussion, workshop attendance will be limited to a maximum of 70 participants. Anyone interested in attending should apply in one of these two ways:

1. Researchers, practitioners, and users with an interest in text classification:

**Please submit a paragraph describing your background, organizational affiliation (if any), and interest in text classification.

2. Prospective speakers with substantial knowledge of one or more operational text classification systems and an interest in presenting a talk based on their experience:

   **Please submit both a paragraph of interest (as described above) and an abstract (maximum 750 words) outlining the major points you would speak on. Talks whose focus is experimental results on standard test collections are discouraged. Conversely, operational text classification at any scale from the tiny (e.g. an evaluation of content filtering software for a small organization) to the huge (e.g. categorizing hundreds of newswires each day) is of interest. Selection of talks will be largely based on the speaker's ability and willingness to discuss technical details of operational systems, as reflected in their abstract.

IMPORTANT DATES

• Interest paragraphs must be received: June 15, 2001
• Talk abstracts must be received: June 15, 2001
• Notification of acceptance: July 15, 2001
• Workshop: September 13, 2001

Submission and Selection:

Submissions should be sent in ASCII or PDF form to:

otc2001submit@DavidDLewis.com

All submissions will be reviewed by the organizers and program committee. The interest paragraphs and talk proposals of invited participants will be reproduced and distributed as an informal notebook at the workshop.

Workshop attendance will be limited to a maximum of 70 participants. For details see http://www.DavidDLewis.com/events/otc2001

Program Committee:

• James Allan, University of Massachusetts
• David Evans, Clairvoyance
• Sue Feldman, IDC
• Norbert Fuhr, University of Dortmund
• Thorsten Joachims, GMD
• Andras Kornai, Northern Light
• Wai Lam, Chinese University of Hong Kong
• Dunja Mladenic, J. Stefan Institute & Carnegie Mellon Univ.
• Isabelle Moulinier, Thomson
• Christopher Porter, Factiva
• Prabhakar Raghavan, Verity
• Mehran Sahami, E.piphany
• Robert Schapire, AT&T
• Frank Smadja, Elron Software
• Richard Tong, Tarragon Consulting
• Mark Wasson, LexisNexis
• Scott Waterman, Kanisa Inc.
• Yiming Yang, Carnegie Mellon University