The Second International Workshop
on Question Answering (QA2008)
Dec. 3-6, 2008,
(Associated with the 4th Int. Conf. on Semantics, Knowledge and Grid -- SKG2008)
1. Aims of the Event
Question answering (QA) is another emerging new information service following the popularization of search engines. QA is more preferable since a direct and exact answer is expected instead of a long list of ranked, possibly relevant but usually long documents, which can be automatically returned by a search engine but still require the user’s manual and sometimes much tedious filtration. After a decade of constant efforts of all researchers, we have seen automatic question answering (AutoQA) has grown up into a new well-known sub-area of information retrieval. However, interactive question answering (InterQA) just emerged a couple of years ago but has already shown its milestone of being mature and successful, when Yahoo! Answers was ranked as the best QA Web 2.0 service in 2007. We are anticipating a new wave of hot Web information services based on InterQA since it is a nature complement to search engines.
Although AutoQA
has been discussed by TREC, CLEF, SIGIR and NTCIR as a sub-domain for many
years, we hope to have a single mind event to discuss on all issues of QA.
Therefore, we started from QA2007 as
the beginning of a new series of workshops which can gather academic researchers
and industrial practitioners and discuss on all issues, including the business
models and enabling technologies, of QA, especially InterQA. Following the success of QA2007, QA2008 will be held again,
associated with SKG2008.
2. Topics of Interest
All topics related to question answering (QA) are of interest for the Workshop. These topics include (but are not limited to):
System Architecture
User
Interfaces
Business Models
User Models and Personalized
Recommendation
Question categorization
Answer Clustering
Answer
Fusion
Social Networks
Reputation Models
Text Similarity
Short Text
Modeling
Patterns and Semantic Patterns
Knowledge Representation
Kernel
Information Retrieval Algorithms for Question Answering
Kernel NLP Algorithms
for Question Answering
Data Mining
Performance Evaluation
Applications
3. Workshop Format
The workshop will be organized in a half-day single-track program during SKG2008 and will be held at the same location. It will comprise several sessions dedicated to specific topics. For each session, there will be a leading presentation describing the main problems and the state of the art, followed by a few short presentations of the speakers’ related papers on the proposed solutions/results. Each session will be concluded by a panel discussion with sufficient amount of time allocated for Q&A and brainstorming on questions related to the presentations and other open questions for the session's topic.
4. Submission
Please use the 8.5" x 11", Two-Column IEEE Format for your
paper. Regular papers are limited to 6 pages and short papers are
limited to 4 pages. We will use the same paper submission system as SKG2008 is using. Please go to http://www.culturegrid.net/skg2008/submission.htm
to find the submission website and other information. Please add the prefix
“QA2008:
” to your paper title such that we will know that this paper
is for the workshop.
5. Review and Publication
Submitted papers will be reviewed by an international program committee and accepted papers will be published in the same Proceedings of SKG2008, which will be published by IEEE Computer Society who will submit the proceedings to EI and SCI for index. All published papers will be included in IEEE Digital Library.
High-quality papers in terms of both content and presentation will be recommended for extension and further review for possible publication in the following SCI-indexed international journals:
6. Registration and Accommodation
Registration will be done together with SKG2008 in one package. A registration package includes both programs. Participants are also advised to contact the SKG2008 organizers for other logistic issues.
7. Important Dates
Submission deadline:
August 20, 2008
Notification to
acceptance:
September 1, 2008
Camera ready version: September 10, 2008
8. Workshop Organization Committee
Liu Wenyin
Department of
Tel: (852) 2784-4730
Fax: (852 2788-8614
email:
csliuwy@cityu.edu.hk
URL: http://www.cs.cityu.edu.hk/~liuwy
Hai Zhuge
Institute of Computing Technology
Chinese
Contact with Liu Wenyin at csliuwy@cityu.edu.hk for any issue of QA2008.
Program Committee:
TBD