#sigir

CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

    Web Question Answering, Beyond Factoids

  to be held in Pisa, Italy, 21st of July, 2016  (co-located with ACM SIGIR)

Great Invited Speakers

David Carmel. Web Question Answering with CQA data

Evgeniy Gabrilovich. Cura Te Ipsum: answering symptom queries with question intent

Eric Nyberg. Beyond Factoid QA: Real Questions from Real Users in Real Time

Mark Sanderson. Getting Rid of the Ten Blue Links

Scott Wen-tau Yih. Question Answering with Knowledge Bases

and program

http://plg2.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~avtyurin/WebQA2016/

http://webqa2016.tumblr.com/

Workshop day

: July 21, 2016. Pisa, Italy.

Background

Web search engines have made great progress at answering factoid queries. However, they are not well-tailored for managing more complex questions, especially when they require explanation and/or description. The WebQA workshop aims at exploring diverse approaches to answering questions on the Web. This year, particular emphasis will be given to Community Question Answering (CQA), where comments by the users engaged in the community can be used to answer new questions. Questions posted on the Web can be short and ambiguous (similarly to Web queries to a search engine). These issues make the WebQA task more challenging than traditional QA, and finding the most effective approaches for it remains an open problem. Unlike the more formal conference format, the aim of this workshop is to bring together researchers in diverse areas working on this problem, including those from NLP, IR, social media and recommender systems communities. This workshop is specifically designed for the SIGIR audience. However, due to its format, its goal, as compared to the main conference, is to conduct a more focused and open discussion, encouraging the presentation of work in progress and late-­breaking initial results in Web Question Answering. Both academic and industrial participation will be solicited, including keynotes and invited speakers.

Important Dates

SIGIR Main Conference: July 17-21, 2016

Workshop: July 21, 2016. Pisa, Italy.

Topics of Interest

Community Question Answering

Social and user-generated question analysis

Machine Learning Methods for QA

Identifying question intent in Web queries

Answer aggregation from various resources

Answer summarization from various resources

Collaboratively Generated Content for QA

Inferring answers for Web questions using knowledge bases or graphs

Answering opinion questions, including sentiment analysis

Answering complex, multi-sentence questions

Evaluation of question answering systems (e.g., via crowd sourcing)

Answer veracity, validation and justification

Workshop Organizers

Eugene Agichtein, Emory University

Charles Clarke, University of Waterloo

Lluis Marquez, Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU

Alessandro Moschitti, Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU

Preslav Nakov, Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU

Idan Szpektor, Yahoo Research

Program Committee

Dasha Bogdanova, Dublin City University

avid Carmel, Yahoo Research

Bruce Croft, University of Umass

Julio Gonzalo, University of Madrid

Iryna Gurevych, Technische Universität Darmstadt

Hang Li, Huawei Technologies

Cicero Nogueira dos santos, IBM Watson, NY

Dan Pelleg, Yahoo Research

John Prager, IBM Watson, NY

Miahi Surdeanu, University of Arizona

Di Wang, Carnegie Mellon University

Chris Welty, Google, NY

David Carmel, Yahoo Research

Evgeniy Gabrilovich, Google Research

Eric Nyberg, Carnegie Mellon University

Mark Sanderson, RMIT University

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                                   First CALL FOR PAPERS

    SIGIR 2016 workshop: Web Question Answering, Beyond Factoids

            co-located with ACM SIGIR 2016 (http://sigir2016.org/)

                    to be held in Pisa, Italy, 21st of July, 2016

      Workshop Website: http://webqa2016.tumblr.com/

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Submission Deadline: May 26, 2016 

Workshop: July 21, 2016. Pisa, Italy.

Background

Web search engines have made great progress at answering factoid queries. However, they are not well-tailored for managing more complex questions, especially when they require explanation and/or description. WebQA workshop aims at exploring diverse approaches to answering questions on the Web. This year, particular emphasis will be given to Community Question Answering (CQA), where comments by the users engaged in the community can be used to answer new questions. Questions posted on the Web can be short and ambiguous (similarly to Web queries to a search engine). These issues make the WebQA task more challenging than traditional QA, and finding the most effective approaches for it remains an open problem.

Unlike the more formal conference format, the aim of this workshop is to bring together researchers in diverse areas working on this problem, including those from NLP, IR, social media and recommender systems communities. This workshop is specifically designed for the SIGIR audience. However, due to its format, its goal, as compared to the main conference, is to conduct a more focused and open discussion, encouraging the presentation of work in progress and late-­breaking initial results in Web Question Answering. Both academic and industrial participation will be solicited, including keynotes and invited speakers.

Important Dates

Submission Deadline: May 26, 2016

Acceptance Notifications: June 20, 2016

Camera-ready Deadline: July 5, 2016

SIGIR Main Conference: July 17-21, 2016

Workshop: July 21, 2016. Pisa, Italy.

Theme and Topics

We encourage submissions describing ongoing research, late breaking, preliminary results, and position papers on all topics related to Web question answering, including:

Community Question Answering

Social and user-generated question analysis

Machine Learning Methods for QA

Identifying question intent in Web queries

Answer aggregation from various resources

Answer summarization from various resources

Collaboratively Generated Content for QA

Inferring answers for Web questions using knowledge bases or graphs

Answering opinion questions, including sentiment analysis

Answering complex, multi-sentence questions

Evaluation of question answering systems (e.g., via crowd sourcing)

Answer veracity, validation and justification

Invited Speakers

David Carmel, Yahoo Research

Evgeniy Gabrilovich, Google Research

Eric Nyberg, Carnegie Mellon University

Mark Sanderson, RMIT University

Scott Wen-tau Yih, Microsoft Research

Submissions

We solicit papers on preliminary or late-breaking research (from 4 to 6 pages), as well as short "opinion" or "position" papers (from 2 to 4 pages). All submissions should be in the ACM conference paper style (http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates).

Papers presented at the workshop will be uploaded to arXiv.org and will be considered non-archival. They may be submitted elsewhere (modified or not). This makes the workshop suitable for presenting anddiscussing current work, without preventing future publications.

Submission link: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=webqa2016

Workshop Organizers

Eugene Agichtein, Emory University

Charles Clarke, University of Waterloo

Lluis Marquez, Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU

Alessandro Moschitti, Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU

Preslav Nakov, Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU

Idan Szpektor, Yahoo Research

Program Committee

Dasha Bogdanova, Dublin City University

David Carmel, Yahoo Research

Bruce Croft, University of Umass 

Julio Gonzalo, University of Madrid

Iryna Gurevych, Technische Universität Darmstadt

Hang Li, Huawei Technologies

Cicero Nogueira dos santos, IBM Watson, NY

Dan Pelleg, Yahoo Research 

John Prager, IBM Watson, NY

Miahi Surdeanu, University of Arizona

Di Wang, Carnegie Mellon University 

Chris Welty, Google, NY