GENERATION 2011 - SPECIAL ISSUE on QUESTION GENERATION --- Call for Papers --- Dialogue & Discourse An International Journal

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Category GENERATION 2011

Deadline: February 15, 2011 | Date: March 10, 2011-March 12, 2011

Venue/Country: Call for Papers, Hong Kong

Updated: 2010-09-17 08:23:36 (GMT+9)

Call For Papers - CFP

--- Call for Papers ---

Dialogue & Discourse

An International Journal

http://www.questiongeneration.org/SpecialIssue/

IMPORTANT DATES

- One-page abstract (intent to submit): December 15, 2010

- Full papers: February 15, 2011

TOPIC

Automatically generating questions is an important task in many

different contexts including dialogue systems, intelligent tutoring

systems, automated assessment and search interfaces. Questions are

used to express informational needs: when we do not know something,

the natural thing to do is to ask about it. As computer systems become

more advanced and are expected to be more adaptive and autonomous,

their informational needs grow, and being equipped with the ability to

ask questions has clear advantages. State-of-the-art spoken dialogue

systems are a good case in point: where would they be without the

ability to ask questions, for example, about the user's goals ("Where

would you like to travel to?") or about their understanding of the

users' utterances ("Did you say 'London'?")?

Of course, the purpose of asking questions is not limited to

satisfying straightforward informational needs. In a classroom, a

teacher may ask a question, not because she doesn't know the answer,

but because she wants to know whether the student knows the answer (or

perhaps she wants to provide the student with a hint that will help

him solve whichever problem he is dealing with). Generating such

questions automatically is a central task for intelligent tutoring

systems. Exam questions are another case in point. In the context of

automated assessment, generating questions automatically from

educational resources is a great challenge, with, potentially,

tremendous impact.

In recent years, a significant body of work has begun accumulating on

Question Generation. In 2010, the third workshop on Question

Generation was held in Pittsburgh (co-located with the Tenth

International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems). This

followed on from Question Generation workshops in Washington, D.C.

(hosted by the National Science Foundation) and Brighton, U.K.

(co-located with the 14th International Conference on Artificial

Intelligence in Education). The 2010 workshop included a track on the

First Question Generation Shared Task and Evaluation Campaign

(QGSTEC), with teams from the US, UK, India, Germany, and Canada

participating. November 2010 also brings the 4th Workshop of

Modelling, Management and Generation of Problems/Questions in

Technology-Enhanced Learning.

SCOPE OF THE SPECIAL ISSUE

Authors in a range of disciplines including, but not limited to,

Discourse Analysis, Dialogue Modelling, Formal Semantics, Intelligent

Tutoring Systems, Natural Language Generation, Natural Language

Understanding, and Psycholinguistics are cordially invited to submit

their work for publication in the Special Issue. The work may report

on the automatic generation of questions from a wide variety of inputs

such as, but not limited to, raw text, numerical data, ontologies, and

dialogue act specifications. The ideal article will describe a

substantial novel body of work on automatic question generation and

will appeal to the Dialogue & Discourse audience. Question generation

is an integral part of dialogue behaviour that brings to the forefront

such issues as when questions are asked, what functions they serve,

and what answers might be expected. Additionally, much of the effort

on automatic generation of questions focuses on generating questions

from text, and consequently relies heavily on automated parsing of

both syntax and discourse structure of the texts. Authors are

encouraged to explain how their work fits into the broader context of

dialogue and discourse research.

GUEST EDITORS

Paul Piwek

Centre for Research in Computing

The Open University, UK

http://mcs.open.ac.uk/pp2464/

Kristy Elizabeth Boyer

Department of Computer Science

North Carolina State University, USA

http://www4.ncsu.edu/~keboyer

REVIEWING COMMITTEE

Gregory Aist (Iowa State University, USA)

Itziar Aldabe (University of the Basque Country, Spain)

Lee Becker (University of Colorado at Boulder, USA)

Delphine Bernhard (LIMSI-CNRS,Orsay, France)

Rafael Calvo (University of Sydney, Australia)

Yllias Chali (University of Lethbridge, Canada)

Vinay K. Chaudhri (SRI International, USA)

Zhi-Hong Chen (National Central University, Taiwan)

Dan Flickinger (Stanford University, USA)

Michael Heilman (Carnegie Mellon University, USA)

James Lester (North Carolina State University, USA)

Mihai Lintean (University of Memphis, USA)

Jack Mostow (Carnegie Mellon University, USA)

Rodney Nielsen (Boulder Language Technologies, USA)

Juan Pino (University of Cambridge, UK)

Rashmi Prasad (University of Pennsylvania, USA)

Vasile Rus (University of Memphis, USA)

Svetlana Stoyanchev (The Open University, UK)

Lucy Vanderwende (Microsoft, USA)

Marilyn Walker (University of California Santa Cruz, USA)

SUBMISSION INFORMATION

Manuscripts should conform to the Dialogue & Discourse requirements

(http://www.dialogue-and-discourse.org/auth_instr.html). One-page

abstracts (intents to submit) must be submitted by email to the guest

editors at MCT-QG2010open.ac.uk no later than December 15, 2010. Full

manuscripts must be submitted by email no later than February 15,

2011.