From: simoudis@titan.rdd.lmsc.lockheed.com (Evangelos Simoudis)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: call for papers and participation
Keywords: case-based reasoning, information retrieval   		       Call for Papers
Date: 2 Sep 92 16:55:52 GMT
Reply-To: simoudis@titan.rdd.lmsc.lockheed.com (Evangelos Simoudis)


                        Symposium on 
	Case-Based Reasoning and Information Retrieval
     Exploring the Opportunities for Technology Sharing

	       1993 AAAI Spring Symposium Series
		     March 23, 24, 25, 1993
                      Stanford University
                      Stanford, California

DESCRIPTION:
The fields of Case-Based Reasoning and Information Retrieval have a
shared interest in the indexing of information, the formulation of
query expressions suited to retrieving relevant cases, heuristic
matching, the measurement of similarity, and the use of domain
knowledge to improve search.  Whereas Case-Based Reasoning research
has historically worked with small collections requiring a fair degree
of hand-tailoring of well structured cases, researchers in Information
Retrieval have concentrated on indexing and querying over very large
collections of primarily textual data, with the aim of minimizing the
need for hand-tailoring.  Perhaps due to these differences, there has
been relatively little interaction to date among practitioners in the
respective fields.

Case-Based Reasoning researchers are now embarking on an ambitious
second phase whose goal is the implementation of systems that use
large databases containing a variety of information types.  For
example, a case base with several thousand cases that contain video
data is currently under development at the Institute for the Learning
Sciences.

Knowledge-based approaches have been introduced into Information
Retrieval systems as well, in the form of thesauri, semantic nets,
concept frames, etc.  There is a recent trend in the IR community
toward extracting and utilizing structured information to complement
full-text retrieval methods, and to extend textual retrieval systems
to encompass multi-media.

Not only does the intersection of the two fields appear to be growing
rapidly, but many tasks (such as text categorization) and many 
application domains (such as legal, medical, help-desk) could utilize
both IR and CBR, raising the question of how to best integrate the
methodologies into a single system with a uniform interface.

The purpose of this symposium is to bring researchers from both
communities together to discuss issues of common interest, share the
results and experiences of their respective research, and seek areas
of potential future technology transfer or convergence.

Specific topics of interest include, but are not limited to, such
questions as:

1. How might IR integrate and take advantage of more structured information,
   as used in CBR?  Can weak and strong retrieval methods be effectively 
   combined?
2. How does CBR scale up to large collections of semi-structured
   information?  How can CBR minimize the need for hand-tailoring of
   the data in a case base?
3. What similarity assessment methods and metrics have been developed
   in CBR and IR? What demands do they make on knowledge representation
schemes?
4. How well do CBR/IR techniques apply to multi-media information bases?
5. How can the construction of viable queries for retrieving desired
   information be facilitated through CBR methods?
6. What kinds of knowledge representations are needed to support reasoning
   (over cases) as opposed to retrieval?  What is the role of reasoning
   in retrieval?
7. Can/should the functions of textual information retrieval and case-based
   reasoning be integrated into a single application?  How can the 
   effectiveness of such a hybrid CBR/IR system be evaluated?

The symposium will consist of individual presentations and panel
discussions with ample opportunity for group discussion.
Participation will be by invitation only.  We will strive for equal
participation from the two communities, as well as between academia
and industry.  However, we will set higher priority to achieving equal
participation from the two communities before trying to achieve equal
participation from academia and industry.

SUBMISSIONS:

Those who wish to make presentations should submit a draft paper, of
length at most ten pages.  All prospective submitters are encouraged
to contact Evangelos Simoudis (simoudis@titan.rdd.lmsc.lockheed.com)
or Peter Anick (anick@aiag.enet.dec.com) to discuss how what they
wish to present is coordinated with the objectives of the symposium.
Those who wish to attend without presenting a paper should send a
description of their research interests and a list of related
publications.  Four copies of submissions should be sent to arrive by
October 16 to:

Evangelos Simoudis
Lockheed AI Center
O/96-20 B/254F
3251 Hanover Street
Palo Alto, CA 94304

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE:

Peter Anick (co-chair), Bruce Croft, William Mark, Chris Riesbeck,
Evangelos Simoudis (co-chair)