* * *  FIRST CALL FOR PARTICIPATION  * * *
 
                    International Workshop on
         Performance Evaluation Issues in Multilingual OCR
 
         Sunday, September 19, 1999 (just before ICDAR'99)
                         Bangalore, India
 
WORKSHOP CHAIRS
  Tapas KANUNGO       University of Maryland, College Park, MD USA
  Henry S. BAIRD      Xerox PARC, Palo Alto, CA USA
 
ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
  Badr AL-BADR        King Abdulaziz City, Saudi Arabia
  Torsten CAESAR      Siemens ElectroCom, Germany
  Bhabatosh CHANDA    ISI Calcutta, India
  Doug COOPER         Southeast Asian Software Research Center, Thailand
  Andreas DENGEL      DFKI, Germany
  Steve DENNIS        U. S. Government, USA
  Xiaoqing DING       Tsinghua University, P.R. China
  David DOERMANN      University of Maryland, USA
  Michel GILLOUX      Service de Recherche Technique de la Poste, France
  Robert M. HARALICK  University of Washington, USA
  Tin Kam HO          Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies, USA
  Donna HARMAN        National Institute for Standards & Technology, USA
  Jonathan HULL       Ricoh CRC, USA
  Fumitaka KIMURA     Mie University, Japan
  Hsi-Jian LEE        National Chiao Tung University, R.O. China
  Seong-Whan LEE      Korea University, Korea
  Tomohiko MORIOKA    Japan Advanced Institute for Science & Tech., Japan
  S. P. MUDUR         National Center for Software Technology, India
  Yasuaki NAKANO      Shinshu University, Japan
  Kris POPAT          Xerox PARC, USA
  Philip RESNIK       University of Maryland, USA
  A. Lawrence SPITZ   Document Recognition Technologies, USA
  Rohini SRIHARI      CEDAR, SUNY Buffalo, USA
  Ching Y. SUEN       Concordia University, Montreal, Canada
  Yuan Yan TANG       Hong Kong Baptist University, China
  Vadim TERESCHENKO   ABBYY Software House, Russia
  Jun TSUKUMO         NEC, Kanagawa, Japan
  Toru WAKAHARA       NTT Human Interface Laboratories, Japan
 
TECHNICAL FOCUS
 
This workshop will explore evaluation methodologies for multilingual OCR 
systems.  By `multilingual' we mean to include systems that are capable 
of reading more than one language in the same document, as well as 
one-language-per-document systems that can be easily retargeted to new 
languages.  We hope to bring together researchers from many countries to 
discuss these and related questions: 
 -- What methodologies should be used to evaluate multilingual OCR systems?
       How do we compare accuracies across languages? 
 -- What ground-truthed data sets are now available in various languages? 
       What kind of datasets need to be collected?  How is this to be 
       achieved?  Which organizations might be willing to support such an 
       the effort? 
 -- What multilingual OCR evaluation tools and error visualization tools
       are available or should be developed? 
 -- What OCR evaluation methods and metrics will be useful for OCR-based 
       machine translation and cross-language information retrieval? 
 -- What are the most pressing open research problems, promising dissertation
       topics, etc?
 
WORKSHOP FORMAT
 
This will be a one-day workshop for a maximum of 70 participants. 
Each participant will submit an extended abstract which will be distributed 
at the Workshop.  All participants are expected to contribute to the 
discussions.
 
At the outset of the workshop, three volunteers will present brief,  informal
summaries of the i) methodologies, ii) corpora, and iii) tools mentioned in
the submitted abstracts.  Then we will split up into three working groups,
focused on these topics, and proceed to discuss key issues, attempt to resolve
questions, compile lists of resources, and draw up recommendations.  Finally,
in a plenary session, representatives of each group will present their
recommendations and invite general discussion.   There will be several
opportunities for informal discussion and socializing.
 
After the workshop, the organizing committee will compile a Workshop Summary,
based on the working group notes, and make it available on the Web.  It is
hoped that the workshop will stimulate cooperative follow-on activities 
that will accelerate the pace of research in multilingual document image 
analysis.
 
EXTENDED ABSTRACT SUBMISSION
 
Each potential participant or group of participants should submit an extended 
abstract, electronically via E-mail (in plain ASCII), no later than March 30, 
1999 to: 
        Tapas Kanungo
        Center for Automation Research
        University of Maryland
        College Park, MD 20742
        E-mail: mlocr@cfar.umd.edu
The abstract should include the name, address, telephone, fax, and email 
address of the author(s).  It should ordinarily be limited to six printed 
pages including references (no figures, please).  Longer submissions 
may be admitted in special cases, e.g. for catalogues of resources. 
Accepted abstracts will be distributed at the Workshop and posted 
on the Workshop website.
 
WORKSHOP WEBSITE
        http://www.cfar.umd.edu/~kanungo/workshop/mlocr.html