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

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

-- 
Prof. Dr. Philipp Cimiano
Semantic Computing Group
Excellence Cluster - Cognitive Interaction Technology (CITEC)
University of Bielefeld

Phone: +49 521 106 12249
Fax: +49 521 106 12412
Mail: cimiano@cit-ec.uni-bielefeld.de

Room H-127
Morgenbreede 39
33615 Bielefeld

Received on Friday, 14 January 2011 08:17:57 UTC