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Editor for this issue: Jody Huellmantel <jodylinguistlist.org>
mitre.org>CALL FOR PAPERS NATURAL LANGUAGE ENGINEERING SPECIAL ISSUE ON QUESTION ANSWERING Guest editors: Lynette Hirschman (MITRE) Robert Gaizauskas (University of Sheffield) As users struggle to navigate the wealth of on-line information now available, the need for automated question answering systems becomes more urgent: specifically, for systems that would allow a user to ask a question in everyday language and get the answer quickly, with back-up material available on demand. Question answering has become, over the past several years, a major focus of research activity. This Call for Papers solicits submissions that discuss the performance, the requirements, the uses, and the challenges of question answering systems. Question answering systems provide a rich research area. To answer a question, a system must analyze the question, perhaps in the context of some ongoing interaction; it must find one or more answers by consulting on-line resources; and it must present the answer to the user in some appropriate form, perhaps associated with justification or supporting materials. Several conferences and workshops have focused on aspects of the question answering research area. For the past two years, the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) (http://trec.nist.gov) has sponsored a question-answering track which has evaluated systems that answer factual questions based on finding answer strings in the TREC corpus, using both information retrieval and natural language processing techniques. A focus on reading comprehension provides a different approach to question answering, evaluating systems' ability to answer questions about a specific reading passage. These kinds of tests are used to evaluate students' comprehension, providing a basis for comparing system performance to human performance. This was the subject of a Johns Hopkins Summer Workshop, http://www.clsp.jhu.edu/ws2000/groups/reading/prj_desc.shtml Both of these research areas have had to address a number of difficult questions: � How can question answering systems be evaluated? Do we have to have human graders, or can we find automated ways of grading short answer tests that approximate human graders closely enough? � How should questions and answers be classified? Should classifications be based on linguistic features of questions and answers? On the types and sources of knowledge used to derive answers? On the types of processing required to derive answers? � What makes a question hard? Can we define linguistic features that help to predict question difficulty? � Can we identify different classes of users of question answering systems, and if so, what are their different requirements? � What makes an answer good? Should answers be short? Long? What about sentence extracts compared to generated text? What about summaries? � What is the best way to present answers to a user? How much context and justification is appropriate? How much drill down needs to be supported? � Do question answering systems need to build models of users' knowledge states to generate appropriate answers? How can this process be managed? � What are reasonable expectations for question answering systems: providing factual answers found literally in texts, providing factual answers inferred from texts, providing summaries of multiple sources, providing analysis? � How does the performance of systems compare to the performance of people? Can such systems complement people? Teach people? Replace people? � Is it possible to create domain-independent question answering systems, or is it critical to restrict the domain of such a system to a specific topic area? What are the trade-offs in terms of performance? � Can a question answering system use spoken input? Can it retrieve information from spoken "documents" such as news stories or interviews? What are the performance penalties when dealing with the additional uncertainty that characterizes speech or OCR? We invite submission of papers addressing any of these questions, or other issues related to the creation, evaluation, or deployment of question answering systems. We also encourage submissions that address infrastructure issues, such as tools for building question answering systems, for collecting corpora, or for annotating collections. Submission Information Submit full papers of no more than 25 pages (exclusive of references), twelve point, double-spaced, with one inch margins before the initial submission deadline. Submissions not conforming to these guidelines will not be reviewed. Email submission is preferred, and should be directed to the special issue editors at the email address: lynetteMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue
science.uva.nl>Call for Papers Student Research Workshop at the joint ACL/EACL 2001 Meeting July 6-11, 2001 Toulouse, France submission deadline: February 12, 2001 The information below can also be found at this URL: www.science.uva.nl/~christof/acl01-student/ Note: The exact dates of the Workshop have not been firmly established yet. Tentatively, the Workshop may take place anytime between 6th and 11th of July, 2001. 1. General Invitation for Submissions The Student Research Workshop is an established tradition at ACL conferences. The main purpose of the workshop is to provide a forum for student researchers who are investigating various areas related to Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing. We would like to invite student researchers to submit their work to the workshop. Seeing that the main mission of the student workshop is to provide the participants with a wide audience and useful feedback, the emphasis of the workshop will be on work in progress. For the Student Workshop, original, and unpublished research is invited on all aspects of computational linguistics, including, but not limited to these topic areas: - pragmatics - discourse - semantics - syntax and the lexicon - phonetics - phonology and morphology - interpreting and generating spoken and written language - linguistic, mathematical and psychological models of language - language-oriented information retrieval and information extraction - corpus-based language modeling - machine translation and translation aids - natural language interfaces and dialogue systems - approaches to coordinating the linguistic with other modalities in multi-media systems - message and narrative understanding systems The main conference will also feature tutorials, workshops, and demos. See the Main ACL/EACL 2001 page for information: http://www.irit.fr/ACTIVITES/EQ_ILPL/aclWeb/acl2001.html 2. Submission Requirements Papers should describe original work in progress. The main purpose of presenting at the workshop is to exchange ideas with other researchers and to receive helpful feedback for further development of the work. Papers should clearly indicate directions for future research wherever appropriate. The papers can have more than one author; however, all authors MUST be students. A paper accepted for presentation at the Student Workshop cannot be presented or have been presented at any other meeting with publicly available published proceedings. Papers that are being submitted to other conferences must indicate this immediately after the title material on the first page. 3. Submission Procedure Paper Registration Registration of your submission is required. This can be done by filling out a form available at the web site of the workshop: http://www.science.uva.nl/~christof/acl01-student/ After you fill out and submit this form, a unique ID number will be generated and sent to you in an e-mail shortly after the paper registration. You will then be able to use this ID number instead of your name on the title page of the paper and in any subsequent correspondence with the workshop co-chairs. If you are unable to use the on-line form for paper registration or experience problems using it, please, send email to acl01-studentMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue