The objective of the workshop is to consider the current state- of-the-art in text analysis, retrieval and understanding, and to draw a plan for how the field of information retrieval can meet the opportunities and challenges of the nineties and beyond. To achieve this objective, the workshop will bring together designers and users of information retrieval systems from academia, industry, and government agencies. The attendees are drawn from the information retrieval, natural language processing, and various research communities that represent the emerging technologies like hypertext/hypermedia, large text databases and dictionaries. The workshop is expected to identify the most significant technology pull factors that will serve as the driving forces behind the future text processing technologies. Furthermore, basic research that should be fostered to fully exploit these technologies will be identified. The workshop will lead to the preparation of an advisory report containing recommendations for the research community, industry, and funding agencies. It is planned to publish this report in widely disseminated journals like SIGIR Forum. In addition, each participant will be required to submit a position paper. The position papers will be published as the workshop proceedings.
