Appel: TALN2004: Workshop on QUESTION-ANSWERING

Tue Jan 13 16:49:25 UTC 2004

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CALL FOR PAPER

Held in conjunction with T A L N 2 0 0 4

              Workshop on QUESTION-ANSWERING
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   Palais de Congrès
   Fès (Maroc)

April 22, 2004

   http://www.lpl.univ-aix.fr/jep-taln04/
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Facing a question such as «What is the most expensive car in the
world?», classical search engines return the documents that are the
most strongly linked to the words of the question, sometimes extract
the excerpts where these words are the most numerous, but let the user
browse texts to actually find an answer. This need leads to develop
systems that are able to extract the parts of documents that are the
most relevant in relation to a question, providing either an answer
when the question is about a precise fact or a summary when it is a
topical question.  These functions can be implemented only if IR
systems are able to analyze both queries and documents more deeply. As
a consequence, question answering is at the crossing of several
research fields: of course, it is grounded in Information Retrieval
but it also concerns Natural Language Processing (NLP) in an important
way and to some extent, fields such as Machine Learning.

Most QA systems are based on a classical search engine that is
enhanced by a question analysis module, a set of modules for
extracting various linguistic features from documents, such as named
entities, terms or syntactic relations, and a module that relies on
all these data for extracting answers by mixing linguistic and
numerical criteria.

Moreover, the QA problem puts forward new functions, or functions that
are still in an embryonic state in current IR systems: evaluating if
an answer to a question exists in a document collection, achieving a
synthesis from multiple or partial answers, using dialog for
constructing a query, or text understanding capabilities for dealing
with anaphora, inferences, or for determining if a set of several
answers is coherent.

More precisely, submissions will present a question answering system as a
whole or will focus on one of its processes provided that it is put in the
question answering context. These processes include but are not limited to:

- question analysis: question typology, extraction of the question
focus, of the question context or more generally, of semantic
constraints

- named entity recognition: fine-grained named entities, unrestricted
domains

- passage extraction

- full or partial similarity of syntactic structures

- terminological tools: extraction and recognition of terms and their
variants

- extraction and justification of answers: answer patterns,
inferences, paraphrase ...

This workshop is particularly concerned by papers that focus on QA
systems for large collections of documents or the Web but papers about
QA systems for restricted domains or dedicated to knowledge bases or
database will also be taken into account.

Submissions can also tackle cross-domain topics in relation to
Question Answering , such as:

- QA and machine learning: use of machine learning for selecting and
extracting answers to a question but also for building on a large
scale resources that are necessary for QA systems;

- multilingual and crosslingual QA: what are the difficulties for
adapting an existing QA system most of them only work for English to
another language; asking a question in a language and searching an
answer in a collection of documents in another language;

- QA and the Web: using the Web as a source of knowledge or a source
of answers; what are the specific aspects of searching an answer on
the Web;

- multi-document QA: fusion and coherence of multiple answers.

SUBMISSION:

Submissions will be minimum 4 page summaries or long papers of no more
than 10 pages, written in French or English, according to the style of
the main conference TALN 2004.

The final version will be a long paper.

Submission format will be PDF, but .doc and .ps will be also admitted.
Papers have to be sent to Brigitte.Grau at limsi.fr, with TALN-QA as
subject.

IMPORTANT DATES:

Submission deadline: 15 January 2004

Notification to authors: 20 February 2004

Camera-ready: 8 March 2004

Question-Answering workshop: 22 April 2004

Groupe LIR - LIMSI
BP 133, 91403 Orsay Cedex
tel. 01 69 85 80 03, fax 01 69 85 80 88
   et
Institut d'Informatique d'Entreprise (IIE)
18 allée Jean Rostand, 91025 Evry Cedex
tel. 01 69 36 73 44, fax 01 69 36 73 09

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