34 The Semantic Conference Organizer Kevin Heinrich, Michael W. Berry, Jack J. Dongarra, Sathish Vadhiyar University of Tennessee, Knoxville, USA CONTENTS 34.1 Background ............................................................. 571 34.2 Latent Semantic Indexing ................................................ 572 34.3 Software Issues .......................................................... 573 34.4 Creating a Conference ................................................... 575 34.5 Future Extensions ....................................................... 579 Acknowledgements ...................................................... 580 References .............................................................. 580 The organization of a technical meeting, workshop, or conference involving submit- ted abstracts or full-text documents can be quite an onerous task. To gain a sense of what topic each submission addresses may require more than just a quick glimpse at the title or abstract. The use of automated indexing and text mining can revolution- ize the manner and speed of information assessment and organization. In this work, we demonstrate the use of Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) for probing and labeling conference abstracts using an intuitive Web interface and client-server internal soft- ware design using grid-based middleware such as NetSolve. Automated text parsing and keyword extraction is facilitated using the General Text Parser software (C++) developed in the UTK Department of Computer Science. 34.1 Background Creating a conference manually can be a burdensome task. After all papers have been submitted, the human organizer must then group the papers into sessions. The session topics can be decided either before or after the organizer has a feel for the material covered in the papers. If the session topics have been pre-conceived, then the organizer must select papers that fit the topic. The other option is to peruse the subject material covered in the papers and discern where natural clusters form and create sessions accordingly. In either case, once a paper has been assigned to a particular session, it cannot belong to another session. This exclusivity causes 0-8493-0052-5/00/$0.00+$.50 c  2001 by CRC Press LLC 571