Report on the ACM International Workshop on Methodologies and Evaluation of Lexical Cohesion Techniques in Real-World Applications (ELECTRA 2005) held at SIGIR 2005

The workshop on Methodologies and Evaluation of Lexical Cohesion Techniques in Real-World Applications (ELECTRA 2005) was held in Salvador, Brazil on August 19 in conjunction with the 28^th ACM Annual International Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2005). The aim of the workshop was to bring together researchers in NLP and IR to discuss the use of lexical cohesion in text applications, such as document and passage retrieval, question answering, topic segmentation and text summarization. There were a number of related workshops in the past: MEMURA 2004 Workshop on Methodologies and Evaluation of Multiword Units in Real-World Applications in association with the 4th International Conference on Language Resources (LREC 2004) [1], Multiword Expressions: Integrating Processing Workshop in association with the 42nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2004) [2], and Multiword Expressions: Analysis, Acquisition and Treatment Workshop in association with the 41st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2003) [3]. The goal of this workshop was to address a wider range of lexical cohesion phenomena in text, not only multiword units, but also relations between words on the sentence, passage and document level, and how they can be useful for information retrieval applications.