linguistlist.org>
Editor for this issue: Jody Huellmantel <jodylinguistlist.org>
email.arizona.edu>- CALL FOR PAPERS Coyote Papers: University of Arizona Working Papers in Linguistics Volume 12: Language in Cognitive Science Submission Deadline: Midnight, January 15, 2001 The University of Arizona Linguistics Circle invites you to submit working papers on psycholinguistics and computational linguistics for a new electronic volume of the *Coyote Papers* to be published in Spring 2001. Submitting authors may be graduate students or faculty members. Submissions are limited to a maximum of one individual and one joint paper per author. Papers should be no longer than 10 single-spaced pages (excluding references, figures, and appendices) and should strictly adhere to the formatting guidelines which can be obtained at: http://wacky.ccit.arizona.edu/~ling/webpages/cp12call.htm . In addition, please include a 150 word abstract. Papers which do not adhere to the formatting guidelines will not be considered. Please provide three hard copies. Submissions via e-mail will also be accepted as long as they are received by the deadline. Submissions via fax will not be accepted. Nofification of acceptance and reviews will be given in mid February. Final revisions will be due in mid March. This will be an electronic volume which will be available online in pdf format at no charge; there will be a printed version available at an extra cost. Questions should be addressed to the editors by email. Editors, Coyote Papers 12: Language in Cognitive Science: Rachel L. Hayes rhayesMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue
linus.mitre.org>Below is a "Call for Papers" for a special issue on question answering for the Journal of Natural Language Engineering. If you have any questions, please direct them to Dr. Lynette Hirschman, 781-271-7789. Thank you. ******************************************** CALL FOR PAPERS JOURNAL OF 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?=20 - 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