[topicmapmail] Call for Papers KRAQ08

[Oleksandr Kolomiyets]

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
stdizier at irit.fr 

Marie-Francine Moens
Department of Computer Science
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium
Marie-Francine.Moens at cs.kuleuven.be
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).