We are pleased to announce that the First WWW Workshop on Question Answering on the Web (QAWeb 2008), will be held Beijing (China) on April 22, 2008, just before the 17th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2008) main program. The QAWeb2008 workshop will provide an excellent opportunity for academic researchers and industrial practitioners at all level of experience to share ideas and knowledge of and discuss all issues, including the business models, enabling technologies, and killer applications, of Web-based question answering (QA), especially, the user-interactive QA services and applications, such as Yahoo! Answers.


Workshop Abstract

A half-day single track workshop is proposed just before the main program of WWW2008 to gather academic researchers and industrial practitioners at all level of experience to share ideas and knowledge of and discuss all issues, including the business models, enabling technologies, and killer applications, of Web-based question answering (QA), especially, the user-interactive QA services and applications, such as Yahoo! Answers. The workshop will feature a breaking-the-ice session of self-introduction of all participants on their interests, followed by several selected sessions for presentations and brainstorming discussions on certain popular topics. For each such session, there will be a leading presentation describing the main problems and the state of the art techniques, followed by a few short presentations of the speakersâ?? related papers on their 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. The summary of the brainstorming panel discussion at each session will be published on the Web together with all presented papers for more active online discussion/comments on the Web. We wish these summaries can inspire more research output and fruitful applications in this area. The workshop will be organized especially to encourage active participation and brainstorming instead of just conference-style presentation of papers.

Workshop Objectives, Goals, and Expected Outcome

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 userâ??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, user-interactive question answering (InterQA) which just emerged a couple of years ago has already witnessed its milestone of being mature and successful since 2007. For example, Yahoo! Answers was ranked as the best Web 2.0 service in 2007. We are anticipating a new wave of hot Web information services based on InterQA since it is a natural complement to search engines, or can be considered as manual 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 propose to start QAWeb2008 as the beginning of a new series of workshops, which can gather academic researchers and industrial practitioners at all level of experience to share ideas and knowledge of and discuss all issues, including the business models, enabling technologies, and killer applications, of QA, especially InterQA.
We expect all participants can actively participate in the panel discussions in addition to some academic and practice paper presentations. A summary of the brainstorming panel discussion at each session will be published on the Web together with all presented papers. We wish these summaries can inspire more research output and fruitful applications in this area.

Targeted Audience

Academic researchers and industrial practitioners at all level of experience, including students, developers, professors, researchers, managers, are welcome to participate in the workshop and discuss on all related issues of questions answering, depending on the paper submissions and discussion topic proposals. We expect to accept at most 20 submissions of academic papers and short industrial practice papers. We expect to have about more than 50 participants registered for the workshop but we may limit the number to 80 since more participants are not effective for workshop-style brainstorming discussion.

Workshop Program Format

The workshop will be organized as a half-day single-track program just before the start of the WWW2008 main program. 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 speakersâ?? related papers on their 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.

Location
QAWeb 2008 will be co-located with WWW2008 at the same place. It will facilitate people to attend to both events.

Workshop Schedule/Important Dates

Submission deadline: Jan. 31, 2008
Notification to acceptance: Feb. 28, 2008
Camera ready version: Mar. 15, 2008
Workshop: April 22, 2008

Workshop Theme and Topics

All topics related to question answering (QA), especially, user-interactive 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

Paper Submission and Publication
Related papers (including 4-page short industrial practice papers and 8-page long academic papers) and discussion topics (2 page) should be submitted online at the BuyAns-POL system. The submissions are subject to review by an international program committee, which are mainly based on relevancy to the workshop themes. If too many submissions are received, the quality is also used as criterion for selection.Accepted papers and panel discussion summaries will be published online at the BuyAns-POL system and the WWW2008 website. A post workshop book of selected and revised papers is planned to be published in a volume of LNCS (to be confirmed)

Participation and Selection Process

Academic papers (8 pages), short industrial practice papers (4 pages) and discussion topics (2 pages) should be submitted online at the BuyAns-POL system, which has successfully served two workshops (GREC2007 and QA2007). We will open a special subject for QAWeb2008 once this proposal is approved. Authors should register an account first and fill in their true email addresses, which will be used for communication for issues related to their submissions. After successful login, click â??Submit Paperâ?? on the menu line to start a submission. Select â??QAWeb2008â?? as the Subject to host your paper. Click â??helpâ?? if the author is unsure at certain point. Each successful submission will be acknowledged by email.
The submissions are subject to review by an international program committee, which are mainly based on relevancy to the workshop themes. If too many submissions are received, the quality is also used as criterion for selection.

Note: Participants registered for QAWeb2008 will also be allowed to attend sessions of the other half-day workshop â??NLP Challenges in the Information Explosion Era (NLPIX 2008)â?? since the two with be treated as one workshop under the title â??Workshops on Language-centric Web Applicationsâ?? in the registration form.

Workshop Proceedings

Accepted papers and panel discussion summaries will be published online at the BuyAns-POL system and the WWW2008 website. A post workshop book of selected and revised papers is planned to be published in a volume of LNCS (to be confirmed).