http://www.buyans.com/qa2008/  

Dec. 4-6, 2008, Beijing, China

(Associated with the 4th Int. Conf. on Semantics, Knowledge and Grid -- SKG2008)

1.    Aims of the Event

Question answering (QA) is another emerging new information service following the popularization of search engines. QA is more preferable since a direct and exact answer is expected instead of a long list of ranked, possibly relevant but usually long documents, which can be automatically returned by a search engine but still require the user’s manual and sometimes much tedious filtration. After a decade of constant efforts of all researchers, we have seen automatic question answering (AutoQA) has grown up into a new well-known sub-area of information retrieval. However, interactive question answering (InterQA) just emerged a couple of years ago but has already shown its milestone of being mature and successful, when Yahoo! Answers was ranked as the best QA Web 2.0 service in 2007. We are anticipating a new wave of hot Web information services based on InterQA since it is a nature complement to search engines.   

Although AutoQA has been discussed by TREC, CLEF, SIGIR and NTCIR as a sub-domain for many years, we hope to have a single mind event to discuss on all issues of QA. Therefore, we started from QA2007 as the beginning of a new series of workshops which can gather academic researchers and industrial practitioners and discuss on all issues, including the business models and enabling technologies, of QA, especially InterQA. Following the success of QA2007, QA2008 will be held again, associated with SKG2008.

2.    Topics of Interest

All topics related to question answering (QA) are of interest for the Workshop. These topics include (but are not limited to):

System Architecture
User Interfaces
Business Models
User Models and Personalized Recommendation
Question categorization
Answer Clustering
Answer Fusion
Social Networks
Reputation Models
Text Similarity
Short Text Modeling
Patterns and Semantic Patterns
Knowledge Representation
Kernel Information Retrieval Algorithms for Question Answering
Kernel NLP Algorithms for Question Answering
Data Mining
Performance Evaluation
Applications

3.    Workshop Format

The workshop will be organized in a half-day single-track program during SKG2008 and will be held at the same location. It will comprise several sessions dedicated to specific topics. For each session, there will be a leading presentation describing the main problems and the state of the art, followed by a few short presentations of the speakers’ related papers on the proposed solutions/results. Each session will be concluded by a panel discussion with sufficient amount of time allocated for Q&A and brainstorming on questions related to the presentations and other open questions for the session's topic.

4.    Submission

Please use the 8.5" x 11", Two-Column IEEE Format for your paper. Regular papers are limited to 6 pages and short papers are limited to 4 pages. We will use the same paper submission system as SKG2008 is using. Please go to http://www.culturegrid.net/skg2008/submission.htm to find the submission website and other information. Please add the prefix “QA2008: ” to your paper title such that we will know that this paper is for the workshop.

5.    Review and Publication

Submitted papers will be reviewed by an international program committee and accepted papers will be published in the same Proceedings of SKG2008, which will be published by IEEE Computer Society who will submit the proceedings to EI and SCI for index. All published papers will be included in IEEE Digital Library.

High-quality papers in terms of both content and presentation will be recommended for extension and further review for possible publication in the following SCI-indexed international journals:

Future Generation Computer Systems (Impact Factor: 1.095).
Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience (Impact Factor: 1.154).
6.    Registration and Accommodation  

Registration will be done together with SKG2008 in one package. A registration package includes both programs. Participants are also advised to contact the SKG2008 organizers for other logistic issues.

7.    Important Dates  

Submission deadline:                 August 20, 2008

Notification to acceptance:        September 10, 2008

Camera ready version:              September 20, 2008

8.    Workshop Organization Committee  

Co-Chairs:
Liu Wenyin

Department of Computer Science
City University of Hong Kong
Tel: (852) 2784-4730
Fax: (852 2788-8614
email: csliuwy@cityu.edu.hk
URL: http://www.cs.cityu.edu.hk/~liuwy

Hai Zhuge

Institute of Computing Technology

Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

Contact with Liu Wenyin at csliuwy@cityu.edu.hk for any issue of QA2008.
Program Committee:

TBD