AQUAINT Final Workshop in Washington DC (2nd to 5th December 2003)
Jim Cowie, Bill Ogden, David Farwell, and Ahmed Abdelali were in Washington, DC from 2nd to 5th December.
They attended the final workshop of Phase I of the Advanced Research and Development Activity (ARDA) AQUAINT
program. This program is intended to produce the next generation of retrieval engines which will answer user's questions,
rather than just retrieving documents. About 25 organizations are involved in the 20 AQUAINT projects. Two of these projects
are from CRL. Bill Ogden and Boris Katz, MIT AI Laboratory are working on the AWARE project, which is intended to evaluate
how well systems work when they can.t actually find an answer. Jim Cowie, David Farwell, and Ahmed Abdelali have been working
with CoGenTex, Ithaca, NY (a small text generation company) and Sergei Nirenburg at the University of Maryland Baltimore County
on the MOQA project. This system uses knowledge representation methods to answer questions about travel and meetings - the
information it uses is automatically extracted from news stories in English, Arabic, and Farsi.
Bill Ogden and Jim Cowie will also be visiting the Army Research Laboratory, Adelphi, MA to discuss Ogden's multilingual chat
evaluation activities and potential new collaborations. David Farwell is holding a meeting of the NSF interlingua markup
project participants, most of whom are also involved in AQUAINT.
