Subject: multilingual ocr ( optical character recognition )

* * * first call for participation * * * international workshop on performance evaluation issues in multilingual ocr ( optical character recognition ) sunday , september 19 , 1999 , bangalore , india ( just before icdar ' 99 - - int ' l conf . on document analysis and recognition ) 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
