16.1878, Calls: Computational Linguistics

[LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-16-1878. Thu Jun 16 2005. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 16.1878, Calls: Computational Linguistics

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1)
Date: 15-Jun-2005
From: Diego Molla < diego at ics.mq.edu.au >
Subject: Computational Linguistics

	
-------------------------Message 1 ----------------------------------
Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2005 09:58:32
From: Diego Molla < diego at ics.mq.edu.au >
Subject: Computational Linguistics



Full Title: Computational Linguistics


Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics

Call Deadline: 04-Jul-2005

THIRD CALL FOR PAPERS

                         SPECIAL ISSUE
                              of
                    COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS
                              on
             QUESTION ANSWERING IN RESTRICTED DOMAINS


GUEST EDITORS

* Diego Molla
  Macquarie University
  diego at ics.mq.edu.au

* Jose Luis Vicedo
  Alicante University
  vicedo at dlsi.ua.es

TOPIC AREA

In early descriptions  of  AI problems,  question answering   (QA) was
typically used to  illustrate   Natural Language  Understanding  (NLU)
tasks.  It   could be  argued  that QA   is an  ideal  task to advance
knowledge in  inference, NLU,  and Computational  Linguistics  (CL) in
general.

There has been a recent surge of interest in research in QA, but much
of that research focuses on the mining of answers from open-domain
text collections.

The use of restricted domains, on the other hand, presents interesting
challenges and opportunities that may take research to a new stage.

Different domains may present different stylistic conventions. Also,
restricted domains may use terminology that is not stored in
conventional lexical resources. As a consequence, approaches devised
for open-domain systems may encounter difficulties when applied to
these specific domains, thus raising the question of how portable and
re-usable these systems can be, and, on the other hand, which kinds of
additional or new NLP techniques are needed.

The most salient opportunities derive from the nature of the
restricted domains and the sorts of questions that are asked in these
domains. Restricted domains enable the development and use of
knowledge and lexical resources that would be impossible to produce
for open domains. Moreover, the kind of questions users desire to pose
to the QA system are dependent on the domain, and typically they
require a more complex processing than the 'factual' questions
generally used in the common evaluations of open-domain QA. Restricted
domains are therefore ideal for the development of logic-based
approaches and the integration of reasoning methods that would handle
questions requiring complex inferences.


TOPICS OF INTEREST

-Comparisons between open-domain and restricted-domain QA.
-Characterisations of types of domains and technology required for QA
 on those domains.
-Portability of QA systems between different domains.
-Generation of answers from multiple documents.
-Use of ontologies.
-Inference and reasoning.
-Question and information source analysis and representation.
-Knowledge representation.
-Answer validation.
-Question type classification and analysis.
-Evaluation.

Papers should not simply describe an existing system. Of primary
interest is the theoretical basis of the work presented. We will
especially welcome papers that show the impact of the above topics on
aspects of QA in restricted domains that may give an insight towards
advanced research in CL and NLP.

SCHEDULE

      4 Jul 2005 - Papers due
     17 Oct 2005 - Notification to authors

SUBMISSION PROCESS

Only electronic submission will be accepted. All submissions should be
sent to the CL journal (compling at ics.mq.edu.au) in accordance with the
instructions provided at http://www.aclweb.org/cl/; in the subject
line of your email, please ensure that you indicate that the paper is
intended for the QA Special Issue.

In addition to following the procedure described on the web site,
authors should also send the abstract of their paper electronically to
the two guest editors: (diego at ics.mq.edu.au), (vicedo at dlsi.ua.es).




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LINGUIST List: Vol-16-1878