SIGIR 2016: Great Speaker and Program at WebQA 2016
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
Scott Wen-tau Yih, Microsoft Research
