QALD 2011 - 1st Workshop on Question Answering over Linked Data (QALD-1)

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Category QALD 2011

Deadline: March 04, 2011 | Date: May 29, 2011

Venue/Country: Heraklion, Greece

Updated: 2011-01-30 14:47:28 (GMT+9)

Call For Papers - CFP

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