[ln] Appel: KRAQ'05, IJCAI Workshop, Edinburgh, deadline: March 10 2005

[Thierry Hamon]

Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2005 11:05:33 +0100 (MET)
From: Patrick SAINT-DIZIER <stdizier at irit.fr>
Message-Id: <200501101005.j0AA5Xd03219 at cassiopee.irit.fr>



IJCAI Workshop, Edinburgh, July 30th, 2005

KRAQ'05: KNOWLEDGE and REASONING for ANSWERING QUESTIONS



Objectives
The introduction of reasoning capabilities in question-answering (QA)
systems appeared in the late 70s. A second generation of QA systems,
aimed at being cooperative, emerged in the late 80s - early 90s. In
these systems, quite advanced reasoning models were developed on
closed domains to go beyond the production of direct responses to a
query, in particular when the query has no response or when it
contains misconceptions.  More recently, systems such as JAVELIN,
Inference WEB or Cogex, operating over open domains, integrate
gradually inferential components, but not as advanced as those of the
90s. Performances of these systems in the recent TREC-QA tracks show
that reasoning components do improve the response relevance and
accuracy. They can also potentially be much more cooperative. However,
there is still a long way before being able to produce accurate,
cooperative and robust QA systems.

Recent foundational, methodological and technological developments in
knowledge representation (e.g. ontologies, knowledge bases
incorporating various forms of incompleteness or uncertainty),
advanced reasoning forms (e.g. relaxation, intensional calculus, data
fusion), not necessarily based on unification, advanced language
processing resources and techniques (for question processing as well
as for generating responses), and recent progress in HLT make it
possible to foresee the elaboration of much more accurate, cooperative
and robust systems dedicated to answering questions from textual data,
from e.g. online texts or web pages, operating either on open or
closed domains.

The workshop will be organized around a few major questions of
interest to a number of AI, NLP, HLT and pragmatics people. One main
question is the characterization of those reasoning procedures that
need to be developed to answer questions, either on closed or on open
domains. Then, are enhancing reasoning procedures and accuracy of
knowledge representation sufficient conditions to improve responses ?
If not, what is the role of language processing and what are the
relevant paradigms (e.g. lexical inference) ? How do language and
reasoning interact ? Next, what are the language models and techniques
appropriate for producing responses which sound natural for the user
(relevant, fluid, of an appropriate granularity, with terms the user
understands, etc.). Another perspective is the role of pragmatics as a
means, for example, to better capture the user's goals and intentions
from his query, and therefore to better organize the
response. Pragmatics is also of importance to better analyse the
potential implicatures the user may draw from NL responses, in
particular when the response is not direct.

List of topics:

- Methodologies for intelligently answering questions,

- New types of questions and related KR, pragmatic and linguistic
  paradigms: procedural questions (how), causal questions (why),
  questions with comparative expressions, questions with negation,
  etc.

- Reasoning aspects:
    * information fusion,
    * search criteria expansion models (e.g. relaxation techniques),
    * summarization and intensional answers,
    * reasoning under uncertainty or with incomplete knowledge,
    * Detecting and resolving query failure (due to e.g. incomplete
      data, misconceptions or false presuppositions)

- Knowledge representation and integration:
    * levels of knowledge involved (e.g. ontologies, domain knowledge),
    * knowledge extraction models and techniques to optimize response
      accuracy,
    * coherence and integration.

- Flexible and interactive systems possibly including a user model,

- Pragmatic dimensions of intelligently answering questions:
    * user intentions, plans and goals recognition in questions,
    * conversational implicatures in responses,
    * principles for the design of cooperative systems.

- Language processing:
    * question processing : parameters of interest for response
      production,
    * response generation (e.g. lexical choice, templates),
    * use of language resources for reasoning in question-answering,
    * explanation production (showing sources and inferences,
      reporting data incompleteness, etc.)

- Evaluation
    * End-to-end evaluation of complex question types,
    * Intrinsic evaluation of inference methods,
    * Data-intensive vs knowledge-intensive methods,
    * portability techniques for closed domains.

Submissions:

The goal of this workshop is to enhance cooperation between
participants with an AI background and the NLP and question-answering
communities. Contributors must be opened to interactions with the
different workshop areas. The programme committee will care to have a
balanced number of participants from the different areas concerned:
reasoning and inference, knowledge representation, NLP (in particular
language generation), question-answering, human language technology
and pragmatics.

Although papers will obviously have a dominant theme, it is important
that they contain material from at least 2 disciplines of the workshop
(AI, NLP, pragmatics, ...).

To encourage an athmosphere appropriate for a workshop, we plan to:
    - have a 15mn discussion at the end of each session,
    - have a panel on future directions of intelligent
      question-answering and on how the different disciplines can
      interact as optimally as possible,
    - have a session of demonstrations and posters.

Submission format:

We welcome short papers (max 5 pages), describing projects or ongoing
research and long papers (max. 10 pages), that relate more established
results. Papers must be sent in .pdf format.  The format to use for
papers and abstracts is the same as for IJCAI. Please follow the IJCAI
formatting instructions and use the supplied Word templates or Latex
sources. The title page (no separate title page is needed) should
include the following information:
Title
Authors' names, affiliations, and email addresses
Topic(s) of the above list, as appropriate
Abstract (short summary up to 5 lines)

Deadlines:

March 10: paper submissions (sent to benamara at irit.fr)
April 20: acceptance/rejection notification
May 15: final papers due, camera-ready
May 25: manuscript sent to IJCAI for printing by organizers.

Publication:

All accepted papers (long and short) will be published in the workshop
proceedings.  A book publication is under project.

Registration:

The registration fees include attendance at the workshop and a copy of
the workshop proceedings. Registration instructions will be posted
here.

Workshop co-chairs and contact persons:
Dr. Farah Benamara and Dr. Patrick Saint-Dizier (benamara at irit.fr,
stdizier at irit.fr)

Programme committee decisions will be co-chaired with:
Dr. Marie-Francine Moens (marie-france.moens at law.kuleuwen.ac.be)

Programme Committee:
Farah Benamara, IRIT, France
Johan Bos, University of Edinburgh, UK
Sanda Harabagiu, University of Texas, USA
Eduard Hovy, ISI, USA
Daniel Kayser, LIPN, France
Mark Maybury, The MITRE Corp., USA
Michael Minock, University of Umea, Sweden
Marie-Francine Moens, KUL, Belgium
Jacques Moeschler, Geneva university, Switzerland
Dan Moldovan, University of Texas, USA
John Prager, IBM, USA
Ehud Reiter, University of Aberdeen, UK
Maarten de Rijke, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Gérard Sabah, LIMSI, CNRS, France
Patrick Saint Dizier, IRIT, CNRS, France
Manfred Stede, University of Potsdam, Germany
Mathiew Stone, Center of Cognitive Science, Rutgers, USA
Kees Van Deemter, University of Aberdeen, UK
Ellen Voorhees, NIST, USA
Bonnie Webber, University of Edinburgh, UK


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