1st Workshop on Question Answering over Linked Data (QALD-1)

http://www.sc.cit-ec.uni-bielefeld.de/qald-1

collocated with the Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC)
http://www.eswc2011.org/



Motivation & Scope
------------------------------
The workshop is aimed at all researchers and practitioners working on
natural language processing approaches to question answering over Linked
Data as well as related topics.
While more and more semantic data is published on the Web, in particular
following the Linked Data principles, the question of how typical Web users
can access this body of knowledge through an intuitive and easy-to-use
interface that hides the complexity of the Semantic Web standards becomes of
crucial importance. Since users prefer to express their information need in
natural language, one of the main challenges lies in translating the user^Òs
information needs into a form such that they can be evaluated using standard
Semantic Web query processing and inferencing techniques. In recent years,
there have been important advances in semantic search and question answering
over RDF data, and in parallel there has been substantial progress on
question answering from textual data as well as in the area of natural
language interfaces to databases. This workshop aims at bringing together
researchers from these communities that accept the challenge of scaling
question answering approaches to the growing amount of heterogeneous and
distributed Linked Data.


Shared Task
-------------------
To facilitate the comparison between different approaches and systems, the
workshop will be preceded by an open challenge in question answering on
DBpedia and Mu- sicBrainz. We will release a DBpedia and a MusicBrainz
dataset as well as 50 training questions of different complexity levels with
manually specified SPARQL queries and answers for each
dataset. Participating systems will then be evaluated on 50 similarly
annotated test questions with respect to precision and recall as well as
efficiency aspects.


Call for Papers
----------------------
We welcome the submission of research papers on all aspects of question
answering over Linked Data, system descriptions of systems participating in
the shared task, and short papers on preliminary research.

The following topics are of special interest:
- Question analysis
- Natural language processing approaches applied to semantic search engines
- Disambiguation and inferencing across multiple sources and domains
- Distributed evaluation of queries over Linked Data
- Lexical resources supporting question answering over Linked Data
- Discovery on the fly of relevant Linked Data sources
- Support of multiple natural languages and cross-lingual QA
- Methods for scaling up question answering to Linked Data
- Efficiency and performance aspects
- Dealing with data and schema heterogeneity
- Answer merging and ranking
- Providing justifications of answers and conveying trust
- User feedback and interaction
- Habitability and usability aspects
- Evaluation of question answering approaches for Linked Data


Important Dates
----------------------
Deadline for workshop papers: March 4
Notification of acceptance: April 1
Deadline for camera-ready version: April 15
Release of QA training dataset and instructions: January 31
Release of QA testset: March 28
Submission of results by participants: April 1
Evaluation of results to participants: March 28


Submission Details
--------------------------
Research papers should not exceed 12 pages in length (excluding references),
system descriptions should not exceed 8 pages (excluding references). Short
papers describing preliminary research or positions can also be submitted
and should not exceed 4 pages in length. All papers have to be submitted in
PDF format; camera-ready versions must be formatted according to the LNCS
guidelines.

Submission and reviewing will be via EasyChair:
http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=qald1

For detailed information and updates on the shared task, there is a
QALD-1 mailing list, to which you can subscribe at the following location:
https://lists.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de/cit-ec/mailman/listinfo/qald-1