LINGUIST List 15.1210

Wed Apr 14 2004

Calls: Computational Ling/UK; Computational Ling/Egypt

Editor for this issue: Andrea Berez <andrealinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. mark, Information Retrieval for Question Answering
2. duclaux, Arabic Language Resources and Tools Conference

Information Retrieval for Question Answering 
Short Title: IR4QA 

Date: 29-Jul-2004 - 29-Jul-2004
Location: Sheffield, United Kingdom
Contact: Rob Gaizauskas
Contact Email: R.Gaizauskassheffield.ac.uk 
Meeting URL: 

Linguistic Sub-field: General Linguistics, Computational Linguistics

Call Deadline: 07-Jun-2004 

This is a session of the following conference: 27th Annual
International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in IR

Meeting Description:

Open domain question answering has become a very active research area
over the past few years, due in large measure to the stimulus of the
TREC Question Answering track. This track addresses the task of
finding *answers* to natural language (NL) questions (e.g. ``How tall
is the Eiffel Tower?'' ``Who is Aaron Copland?'') from large text
collections. This task stands in contrast to the more conventional IR
task of retrieving *documents* relevant to a query, where the query
may be simply a collection of keywords (e.g. ``Eiffel Tower'',
``American composer, born Brooklyn NY 1900, ...''). 

Call for Papers

 SIGIR'04 Workshop

 INFORMATION RETRIEVAL FOR QUESTION ANSWERING (IR4QA)

 July 29, 2004, Sheffield, UK


Finding answers requires processing texts at a level of detail that
cannot be carried out at retrieval time for very large text
collections. This limitation has led many researchers to propose,
broadly, a two stage approach to the QA task. In stage one a subset of
query-relevant texts are selected from the whole collection. In stage
two this subset is subjected to detailed processing for answer
extraction. To date stage one has received limited explicit attention,
despite its obvious importance -- performance at stage two is bounded
by performance at stage one. The goal of this workshop is to correct
this situation, and, hopefully, to draw attention of IR researchers to
the specific challenges raised by QA.

A straightforward approach to stage one is to employ a conventional IR
engine, using the NL question as the query and with the collection
indexed in the standard manner, to retrieve the initial set of
candidate answer bearing documents for stage two. However, a number
of possibilities arise to optimise this set-up for QA, including:
* preprocessing the question in creating the IR query;
* preprocessing the collection to identify significant information that 
 can be included in the indexation for retrieval;
* adapting the similarity metric used in selecting documents;
* modifying the form of retrieval return, e.g. to deliver passages
 rather than whole documents.

For this workshop, we solicit papers that address any aspect of how
this first, retrieval stage of QA can be adapted to improve overall
system performance. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
* parametrizations/optimizations of specific IR systems for QA
* studies of query formation strategies suited to QA
* different uses of IR for factoid vs. non-factoid questions
* utility of term matching constraints, e.g. term proximity, for QA
* analyses of passage retrieval vs full document retrieval for QA
* analyses of boolean vs ranked retrieval for QA
* impact of IR performance on overall QA performance
* named entity preprocessing of questions or collections
* corpus preprocessing to create corpus-specific thesauri for question
 expansion
* evaluation measures for assessing IR for QA 

The workshop will include paper presentations and discussion. All
those wishing to make a presentation should submit a 5-8 page position
paper; other attendees may submit a short abstract on why this topic
is of interest to them. The papers should describe recent work and may
be preliminary in nature. The programme committee will arrange the
presentations and discussion based on the quality of submissions and
expressed interests of the attendees, and may invite other
presentations as well. See http://www.sigir.org/sigir2004 for further
details.

Important Dates
===============

Position paper submission: June 7
Acceptance notification: June 23
Final papers due: July 6
Workshop: July 29
\end{tabbing}

Submission Instructions
=======================

Position papers should be no more than 4000 words (5-8 pages). The
standard ACM conference style is recommended (see:
http://www.acm.org/sigs/pubs/proceed/template.html). Submissions must
be sent electronically in PDF or PostScript format to:

Rob Gaizauskas
R.Gaizauskassheffield.ac.uk

Workshop Organizers
===================

Rob Gaizauskas (University of Sheffield)
Mark Hepple (University of Sheffield)
Mark Greenwood (University of Sheffield)

Programme Committee
===================

Shannon Bradshaw (University of Iowa)
Charles Clarke (University of Waterloo)
Sanda Harabagiu (University of Texas at Dallas)
Eduard Hovy (University of Southern California)
Jimmy Lin (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Christof Monz (University of Maryland)
John Prager (IBM)
Dragomir Radev (University of Michigan)
Maarten de Rijke (University of Amsterdam)
Horacio Saggion (University of Sheffield)
Karen Sparck-Jones (University of Cambridge)
Tomek Strzalkowski (State University of New York, Albany)
Ellen Voorhees (NIST) 

Arabic Language Resources and Tools Conference 

Date: 22-Sep-2004 - 23-Sep-2004
Location: Cairo, Egypt
Contact: Bente Maegaard
Contact Email: nemlarcst.dk 
Meeting URL: http://www.nemlar.org 

Linguistic Sub-field: Computational Linguistics 
Subject Language Family: Arabic ,Arabic based


Call Deadline: 15-May-2004 

Meeting Description:

The focus will be put on on Arabic language technology and on the
necessary language resources and tools for both research and
commercial development of language technology for Arabic. Multilingual
language technology is also in the focus, as well as general
methodologies. Evaluation of modules and systems is another field
which is closely related to language resources, because language
resources are used to perform the
evaluation.

Conference aims

Language Resources (LRs) are recognised as a central component of the
linguistic infrastructure, necessary for the development of HLT
applications and products, and therefore for industrial development.

In this conference, we will focus on Arabic language technology and on
the necessary language resources and tools for both research and
commercial development of language technology for Arabic. Multilingual
language technology is also in the focus, as well as general
methodologies. Evaluation of modules and systems is another field
which is closely related to language resources, because language
resources are used to perform the evaluation. Consequently we also
invite papers in this area.

Substantial mutual benefits are achieved by addressing these issues
through international collaboration. For this reason, the conference
is organised at the international level.

The aim of this conference is to provide an overview of the
state-of-the-art for Arabic resources and tools, discuss problems and
opportunities, exchange information regarding LRs, their applications,
ongoing and planned activities, industrial uses and needs,
requirements coming from the new e-society, both with respect to
policy issues and to technological and organisational ones.

Conference topics

- Issues in the design, construction and use of Arabic Language
Resources (LRs)
- Issues in Human Language Technologies (HLT) evaluation
- Policy issues, international cooperation, strategies for the support
of LR
- Exploitation of Arabic data for the development of language
technologies

Please check the web site www.nemlar.org for the full Call text.

Programme
The Scientific Programme will include invited talks and oral
presentations, referenced demonstrations and panels.

Abstract submission

On-line submission forms will soon be available. 
Please check the project and conference web pages, www.nemlar.org.

Important dates

- Submission of proposals for papers, referenced demos: 15 May 2004
- Notification of acceptance: 15 June 2004
- Final versions for the proceedings: 20 August 2004

Programme chairs

- Khalid Choukri, ELDA, Paris, France (co-chair)
- Bente Maegaard, CST, University of Copenhagen, Denmark (co-chair)

The programme committee, the scientific committee and the organising
committee are found on the project and conference web site.

NEMLAR

For more information about NEMLAR (Network for Euro-Mediterranean
LAnguage Resource and human language technology development and
support), please contact:

Bente Maegaard (co-ordinator)
Tel: + 45 35 32 90 90
Fax: + 45 35 32 90 89
Email: nemlarcst.dk
Web: www.nemlar.org