cfp KRAQ08: Knowledge and Reasoning for Answering Questions workshop (COLING 2008)

Hello,
I would appreciate it if you could forward the following cfp to the 
list.
Many thanks,
Christina Lioma

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*Apologies for cross-postings*

KRAQ08: Knowledge and Reasoning for Answering Questions
Manchester, UK, August 23, 2008
Held in conjunction with COLING-2008 the 22nd International Conference 
on Computational Linguistics
August 18-22, 2008

http://www.irit.fr/recherches/ILPL/kraq08.html


This workshop is the fourth of a successful series, it follows:
KRAQ05 (IJCAI 2005 Edinburgh, UK)
KRAQ06 (EACL 2006, Trento, Italy)
KRAQ07 (IJCAI 2007, Hyderabad, India).

Call for papers

Confronted with large information databases there is an urgent need for 
retrieving concise answers to your information need that possibly are 
fused from different sources. Question answering (QA) systems that 
intelligently and cooperatively respond to the user’s questions posed in 
natural language aim at realizing this goal. Reasoning is here regarded 
as an important technology. Although quite advanced reasoning models are 
around for several decades in closed domain QA, it is only recently that 
open domain QA has recognized the potential of automated reasoning. 
Performance in the recent TREC-QA tracks show that inferencing 
substantially improves the response relevance and accuracy. However, 
there is still a long way to go before we can consider our document 
repositories (such as World Wide Web) as a huge knowledge base with 
question answering technology acting as the ultimate expert system. 
However, recent foundational, methodological and technological 
developments in knowledge representation (e.g. ontologies developed in 
the context of the Semantic Web, knowledge bases incorporating various 
forms of incompleteness or uncertainty), in advanced reasoning forms 
(e.g. data fusion-integration, argumentation, decision theory, fuzzy 
logic, incomplete knowledge bases, probabilistic inferencing, etc.), in 
advanced language processing resources and techniques (for question 
processing, generating responses and textual inferencing), and recent 
progress in human language technology and formal pragmatics (user 
models, intentions, etc.) help us progressing towards this goal.

There have been several QA workshops in the past. Some of them were 
oriented towards the processing of massive sources of data like the Web. 
A few concentrated on user profiling, on a specific application 
(medical, opinion) or on the processing of the questions. The KRAQ 
series of workshops alternately organized at AI and NLP conferences 
address more fundamental problems of QA. More specifically its 2008 
edition will investigate models where answers might be retrieved and 
fused from different types of data repositories (text, multimedia, web 
pages etc.) containing either open or closed domain content and they 
might be accompanied by explanations and arguments on how the system 
came to an answer.

We invite papers on any research topic related to question answering and 
reasoning. In this call we especially focus on:
- Reasoning aspects: information fusion-integration, summarization and 
intensional answers, detecting and resolving query failure, reasoning 
under uncertainty or with incomplete knowledge,  probabilistic 
inference, models for explanation production and argumentation, levels 
of knowledge involved (e.g. ontologies, domain knowledge).
- Textual inference question decomposition into candidate inference 
components, information alignment, entity linking within and across 
documents, entailment and paraphrasing.
- Innovative applications: multimedia question answering, where you 
question a more or less formal representation of the media objects, 
spoken question answering (increasing uncertainty caused by the speech 
recognition), question answering of semi-structured documents such as 
Wikipedia and legislation, XML question answering.

We also welcome papers on more traditional QA topics such as:

- Question analysis and related knowledge representation, pragmatic and 
linguistic paradigms: procedural questions (how), causal questions 
(why), opinion questions, questions with a complex structure.
- Pragmatic dimensions of intelligently answering questions: user 
intentions, plans and goals recognition and production, conversational 
implicatures in responses, principles for the design of cooperative 
systems.
- Language processing: question processing: parameters of interest for 
response production, semantic role detection for QA, reasoning with 
lexical resources,  response production (planning and argumentation), 
language generation (e.g. lexical choice, templates), explanation 
production (showing sources and inferences, reporting data 
incompleteness, etc.).
- Evaluation: end-to-end evaluation of complex question types, intrinsic 
evaluation of inference methods, data-intensive vs knowledge-intensive 
methods, evaluation of portability.

The goal of the KRAQ08 workshop is to enhance cooperation between 
participants with an AI background and members of the NLP and question-
answering communities. The programme committee will take care of having 
a balanced number of papers from the different areas concerned.

Submission format

We welcome short papers (max. 4 pages) describing projects or ongoing 
research and long papers (max. 8 pages), that include established 
results. Papers can be uploaded in pdf format at 
https://www.softconf.com/coling08/KRAQ08/submit.html. The format to use 
for papers and abstracts is the same as for Coling 
(http://www.coling2008.org.uk/). All papers are blinded for review. The 
title page includes the following information:
- Title
- Topic(s) of the above list, as appropriate
- Abstract (short summary up to 5 lines).

Deadlines:

May 5, 2008: paper submissions
June 6, 2008: acceptance/rejection notification
July 1, 2008: final papers due, camera-ready manuscript sent for 
printing by organizers.

All accepted papers (long and short) will be published in the workshop 
proceedings. We are currently negotiating a special journal issue or 
book publication for the best long papers.

Co-chairs

Patrick Saint-Dizier   CNRS
IRIT Toulouse, France
[email protected]

Marie-Francine Moens
Department of Computer Science
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium
[email protected]

Programme Committee

Leila Amgoud, IRIT CNRS, France,
Sivaji Badhyopadyay, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India
Johan Bos, Università di Roma, Italy
Gosse Bouma, University of Groningen, The Netherlands
Maarten de Rijke, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Sanda Harabagiu, University of Dallas, USA
Jerry Hobbs, University of Southern California/ISI, USA
Kentaro Inui, NAIST, Nara, Japan
Asanee Kawtrakul, Kasetstart University, Bangkok, Thailand
Dietrich Klakow, Universität des Saarlandes, Germany
Jochen L. Leidner, Thomson Corporation , USA
Anne-Laure Ligozat, LIMSI, France
Marie-Francine Moens, K.U.Leuven, Belgium (co-chair)
Matteo Negri, ITC-irst, Italy
Silvia Quarteroni, University of Trento, Italy
Patrick Saint-Dizier, IRIT-CNRS, France (co-chair).