Expansion of Multimodal Summarization for Trend Information -- Report on the first and second cycles of the MuST Workshop --

A trend, which is a general tendency in the way a situation is changing or developing, is based on temporal statistical data, and can be obtained by synthetically summarizing it. A system that can properly answer questions on interesting trends must help users to understand and review a huge amount of information. MuST, a workshop on multimodal summarization for trend information, was designed to encourage cooperative and competitive studies on multimodal summarization for trend information, and to allow it to construct such an information system. MuST is a pilot workshop of the NTCIR workshop. It has been run based on approximately one year as one cycle, and it finished its second cycle in March 2007. Several researches with broader scope than initially expected have been conducted in the workshop. This paper explains the framework and objective of the MuST workshop, reviews researches conducted there and the results obtained so far, and discusses the role of the workshop for those researches.