CFP: 1st Workshop on Question Answering over Linked Data (QALD-1)

[Apologies for cross-posting]

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1st Workshop on Question Answering over Linked Data (QALD-1)

http://www.sc.cit-ec.uni-bielefeld.de/qald-1

collocated with the

Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC)

http://www.eswc2011.org/


* Motivation & Scope *

The workshop is aimed at all researchers and practitioners working on
natural language processing approaches to question answering over Linked
Data as well as related topics.
While more and more semantic data is published on the Web, in particular
following the Linked Data principles, the question of how typical Web
users can access this body of knowledge through an intuitive and
easy-to-use interface that hides the complexity of the Semantic Web
standards becomes of crucial importance. Since users prefer to express
their information need in natural language, one of the main challenges
lies in translating the user’s information needs into a form such that
they can be evaluated using standard Semantic Web query processing and
inferencing techniques. In recent years, there have been important
advances in semantic search and question answering over RDF data, and in
parallel there has been substantial progress on question answering from
textual data as well as in the area of natural language interfaces to
databases. This workshop aims at bringing together researchers from
these communities that accept the challenge of scaling question
answering approaches to the growing amount of heterogeneous and
distributed Linked Data.

* Shared Task *

To facilitate the comparison between different approaches and systems,
the workshop will be preceded by an open challenge in question answering
on DBpedia and Mu- sicBrainz. We will release a DBpedia and a
MusicBrainz dataset as well as 50 training questions of different
complexity levels with manually specified SPARQL queries and answers for
each dataset. Participating systems will then be evaluated on 50
similarly annotated test questions with respect to precision and recall
as well as efficiency aspects.

* Call for Papers *

We welcome the submission of research papers on all aspects of question
answering over Linked Data, system descriptions of systems participating
in the shared task, and short papers on preliminary research.

The following topics are of special interest:

- Question analysis
- Natural language processing approaches applied to semantic search  
engines
- Disambiguation and inferencing across multiple sources and domains
- Distributed evaluation of queries over Linked Data
- Lexical resources supporting question answering over Linked Data
- Discovery on the fly of relevant Linked Data sources
- Support of multiple natural languages and cross-lingual QA
- Methods for scaling up question answering to Linked Data
- Efficiency and performance aspects
- Dealing with data and schema heterogeneity
- Answer merging and ranking
- Providing justifications of answers and conveying trust
- User feedback and interaction
- Habitability and usability aspects
- Evaluation of question answering approaches for Linked Data

* Important Dates *

Deadline for workshop papers: March 4
Notification of acceptance: April 1
Deadline for camera-ready version: April 15
Release of QA training dataset and instructions: January 31
Release of QA testset: March 28
Submission of results by participants: April 1
Evaluation of results to participants: March 28

* Submission Details *

Research papers should not exceed 12 pages in length (excluding
references), system descriptions should not exceed 8 pages (excluding
references). Short papers describing preliminary research or positions
can also be submitted and should not exceed 4 pages in length. All
papers have to be submitted in PDF format; camera-ready versions must be
formatted according to the LNCS guidelines.

Submission and reviewing will be via EasyChair:

http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=qald1

For detailed information and updates on the shared task, there is a
QALD-1 mailing list, to which you can subscribe at the following  
location:

https://lists.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de/cit-ec/mailman/listinfo/qald-1



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