Given the exponential growth of electronic information available in many languages, one of the primary difficulties facing users is information overload. This talk will focus on two new technologies for dealing with this problem.

The first part of the talk will report on an international effort to identify research areas for dealing with multilingual information overload. The results of two international meetings will be presented, including discussion of strategic technologies, requirements for lexical resources, and new user needs in the multilingual environment.

The second part of the talk will report research results on multi-document summarization for domain independent documents. Summaries can function as an abbreviated form of a document or as an aid in assessing the relevance of a document to a selected topic, thereby reducing the amount of information a user must read. The unique aspects of our research are: the integration of knowledge about a document derived with both statistical and symbolic analysis techniques; the use of language generation for reformulating this information into a concise and coherent summary; and summarization across sets of related articles.