Workshop on Text Mining

held at the European Conference on Machine Learning (ECML'98),
Chemnitz, Germany 21-24 April 1998
(WWW address:http://www.tu-chemnitz.de/informatik/ecml98/).

24 April 1998

Organized by: Yves Kodratoff (Univ. Paris-11, France)

The purpose of Text Mining can be described as searching what knowledge can
be gathered from a collection of texts, even when the understanding is
imperfect. It does not want to improve on Natural Language Understanding
(it makes use of results obtained in this field, without trying to improve
on them). It tries to increase the amount of knowledge to be extracted for
a given level of understanding (that can be an indexing, etc.).

This workshop aims also at gathering people specialists in
                data mining
                linguistics
                data bases and text (understanding and indexing)

The workshop should succeed in defining precisely what TM is about, and
make clear the differences and commonalities with "information retrieval".
Here is a proposal that can serve as first step to the discussions:
1 - Characterize the state-of-the art levels of understanding: indexing,
syntactic analysis, semantic analysis, for instance.
2 - Find the existing tools for each such level, and characterize their
properties.
3 - For each level, define the type of information one starts, in
principle, with.
4 - What knowledge can be gathered from each type of information, and, all
being fixed above, improve on knowledge extraction from each level.

Organization plan:

Morning:
        invited talk of Ronen Feldman
        presentation of results
Afternoon
        invited talk or presentation of results
        debate on TM / Information Retrieval

This workshop will be coordinated with TANLPS (Towards adaptive NLP-driven
systems: linguistic information, learning methods and applications): the final
organization will comprise a common half-day the exact program of which is
still to be decided.

Programme committee:

Bourigault Didier (Univ. Paris 13), Cluet Sophie (INRIA, Paris), Daelemans
Walter (KUB Amsterdam), Feldman Ronen (Univ. Bar-Ilan), Ganascia
Jean-Gabriel (Univ. Paris 6), Hahn Udo (Univ. Freiburg), Kloesgen Willi
(GMD, Bonn), Nedellec Claire (Univ. Paris 11), Rousset Marie-Christine
(Univ. Paris 11), Sebastiani Fabrizio (CNR Pisa), Zweigenbaum Pierre (Univ.
Paris 6), Wilks Yorick (Univ. Sheffield).

Paper Submission: Papers should not exceed 5000 words or 10 pages.
Three copies of the paper should be sent to: Yves Kodratoff, Bat. 490,
Univ. Paris-Sud, F - 91405 Orsay (France). Electronic submission is
possible but must be doubled with a hard-copy submission.

Important dates:
Workshop Final Call for Papers :        20 January 1998
Papers due :    20 February 1998
Notification of Acceptance :    5 March 1998
Final version due :     25 March 1998
Workshop:       24 April 1998.