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<p class=MsoNormal align=center style='margin-bottom:12.0pt;text-align:center;
line-height:11.0pt'><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";
color:navy'><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal align=center style='margin-bottom:12.0pt;text-align:center;
line-height:11.0pt'><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";
color:black'>CALL FOR PAPERS<br>
<br>
<strong><span style='font-family:"Trebuchet MS","sans-serif"'>Workshop on the
Question Generation Task and Evaluation Challenge</span></strong><br>
</span><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";
color:black'>Sponsored by National Science Foundation/Endorsed by SIGGEN</span><span
style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal align=center style='margin-bottom:12.0pt;text-align:center;
line-height:11.0pt'><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";
color:black'><br>
<br>
September 25-26, 2008<br>
National Science Foundation, Arlington, VA<br>
<a href="http://www.questiongeneration.org/"><span style='font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"'>www.questiongeneration.org</span></a>
<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><strong><span style='font-family:"Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";
color:navy'><o:p> </o:p></span></strong></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><strong><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif";
color:navy'><o:p> </o:p></span></strong></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><strong><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";
color:black'>Goal</span></strong><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:
"Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";color:black'><br>
<br>
The natural language generation community has recently identified shared task
evaluation campaigns as a potential avenue to provide a focus of research in
natural language generation and to increase the visibility of natural language
generation in the wider natural language processing/computational linguistics
community.<br>
<br>
We would like to contribute to this effort by first properly defining and then
offering a shared task on Question Generation. As a first approximation, we
define Question Generation as the automatic generation of questions (Factual
questions, Yes/No-questions, Why-questions, etc.) from inputs such as text (in
particular, declarative sentences), raw data, and knowledge bases. The role of
this workshop is to reach a community consensus with respect to the Question
Generation shared task. The discussions will be guided by the Desiderata for
Evaluation of Natural Language Generation (Paris et al., 2007 in Shared Tasks
and Comparative Evaluation in Natural Language Generation: Workshop Report,
Michael White and Robert Dale, Eds.) outlined at the NSF/SIGGEN Workshop on
Shared Tasks and Comparative Evaluation in Natural Language Generation in 2007.<br>
<br>
Question Generation is an essential component of learning environments, help
systems, information seeking systems, multi-modal conversations between virtual
agents, and a myriad of other applications. However, systematic research on
Question Generation has been conspicuously absent in the computational
linguistics community at large and in the natural language generation community
in particular, in spite of substantial attention to the complementary question
answering processes. The time is ripe to address the important topic of
automated Question Generation.<br>
<br>
We invite submissions of short papers (2 pages including references) that
address topics relevant to Question Generation as a shared task, as provided
below:<br>
<br>
-cognitive and computational models of Question Generation that could inform
the definition of Question Generation shared task(s)</span><span
style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Trebuchet MS","sans-serif"'><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";
color:black'>-question taxonomies</span><span style='font-size:11.0pt;
font-family:"Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";color:navy'><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";
color:black'>-Question Generation main task(s)</span><span style='font-size:
11.0pt;font-family:"Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";color:navy'><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";
color:black'>-Question Generation sub-task(s)</span><span style='font-size:
11.0pt;font-family:"Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";color:navy'><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";
color:black'>-data collection and preparation</span><span style='font-size:
11.0pt;font-family:"Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";color:navy'><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";
color:black'>-representation language(s) for the input and output data</span><span
style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";color:navy'><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";
color:black'>-annotation schemes and processes</span><span style='font-size:
11.0pt;font-family:"Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";color:navy'><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";
color:black'>-forms of evaluation (human-based vs. automatic vs.
semi-automatic)</span><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";
color:navy'><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";
color:black'>-evaluation metrics</span><span style='font-size:11.0pt;
font-family:"Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";color:navy'><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:11.0pt;
font-family:"Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";color:black'>-others</span><span
style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";color:navy'><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Trebuchet MS","sans-serif"'>Limited
travel support is available for qualified participants. If you would like to
apply for travel support please send an email to Vasile Rus (<a
href="mailto:vrus@memphis.edu"><span style='font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";
color:windowtext'>vrus@memphis.edu</span></a>) as soon as possible.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";
color:black'><br>
Submission Guidelines<br>
<br>
Papers should follow the ACL paper format and should not exceed 2 pages
including references. Templates are available at <a
href="http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/acl08/stylefiles.html"><span
style='font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"'>http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/acl08/stylefiles.html</span></a>.
Submissions should include information about authors (no anonymous
submissions). Papers must be submitted via email to <a
href="mailto:vrus@memphis.edu"><span style='font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"'>vrus@memphis.edu</span></a>
before or on the submission deadline (see next). The papers must be submitted
in PDF format. <br>
<br>
Important Dates<br>
<br>
Submission Deadline: August 1, 2008<br>
Notification Deadline: August 15, 2008<br>
Camera-Ready Papers Due: September 1, 2008<br>
<br>
Organizing Committee<br>
<br>
Workshop Co-chairs:<br>
<br>
Vasile Rus, The University of Memphis<br>
Art Graesser, The University of Memphis<br>
<br>
Steering Committee:<br>
<br>
James Lester, North Carolina State University <br>
Jose Otero, University of Alcala<br>
Paul Piwek, Open University<br>
Amanda Stent, Stony Brook University</span><span style='font-family:"Arial","sans-serif";
color:navy'><o:p></o:p></span></p>
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