[Corpora-List] CfP: Special Issue on QUESTION GENERATION

[P.Piwek]

     SPECIAL ISSUE on QUESTION GENERATION

            --- 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-QG2010 at open.ac.uk no later than December 15, 2010. Full manuscripts must be submitted by email no later than February 15, 2011. 
 

-- 
The Open University is incorporated by Royal Charter (RC 000391), an exempt charity in England & Wales and a charity registered in Scotland (SC 038302).


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