It is
our great honor and pleasure to welcome you to the First International Workshop
on Web Document Analysis - WDA2001.
With
the ever-increasing use of the Web, a growing number of documents are published
and accessed on-line. The emerging issues pose new challenges for Document
Analysis and Content Extraction. While there has been active research on Web
Content Extraction using text-based techniques, documents are in fact
2-dimensional entities, and often include multimedia content. Hence, techniques
that have been developed for image-based documents could prove valuable in the
realm of Web documents, and new methods for the analysis of multimedia content
will be required.
This workshop
is intended as a forum for discussing emerging issues in document analysis in
Web environments. The papers submitted to the workshop reflect the diverse and
interdisciplinary nature of this field, touching on areas including document
image processing, layout and structure analysis, information retrieval, content
extraction, and digital document modeling. In addition, we have invited experts
from Document Image Analysis, Information Retrieval, Natural Language
Processing, Semi-Structured Databases and Multi-Modal Web Access for an opening
panel discussion on the state of art and future directions of Web Document
Analysis.
It is our
hope that this workshop will bring together researchers from diverse research
backgrounds and serve to stimulate new ideas, new collaborations and new
research activities in the emerging field of Web Document Analysis.
Many people
helped in making this workshop a reality. We would like to thank members of the
program committee for their thorough and prompt reviews and numerous
constructive ideas; all contributing authors for their enthusiasm and support;
and the organizers of ICDAR'01 for their support and generous help in making the
organizational arrangements.
WDA2001 Co-Chairs
Apostolos
Antonacopoulos and Jianying Hu