Question Answering for Complex Domains (QACD'2012)

9th December 2012, Mumbai, India
(collocated with 24th International Conference on Computational
Linguistics)

https://sites.google.com/site/qacd2012/



Significant progress has been made in building Question Answering systems
that are focussed on providing precise answers to specific questions in one
shot. In many real world situations, however, the information need may be
specified vaguely and some sort of interaction may be required for a
complete specification of the problem. Further, the correct answer of the
question may be a procedure or passage rather than a factoid. For example,
someone having trouble with battery life for her smartphone may express a
query as ‘battery dying too soon for my XYZ phone’. The intent of the user
here, obviously, is to seek a resolution to her problem. The resolution in
question may be a procedure consisting of a sequence of steps. In order to
recommend the correct resolution, a system may first have to engage in a
dialog with the user to ascertain all the symptoms and match the correct
resolution (‘answer’).

In this workshop, we are looking to explore such advanced QA systems that
seek to resolve more general user problems in an interactive manner. We are
specifically interested in the problem of rapidly bootstrapping such QA
systems with limited data annotation. We invite researchers to submit
papers discussing techniques for rapid annotation of Q/A pairs, information
extraction, machine learning and interactive dialog for building such
systems. The workshop topics include but are not limited to:

Semi-automated data collection for building QA systems
Crowdsourcing techniques applied to building QA systems
Learning apriori or on the fly domain models for QA systems
Information Extraction of problem resolutions from text
Dialog systems for interactive question answering - clarification
sub-dialogues, error correcting dialogues
Building dialogue models using conversation transcripts
System descriptions of large QA systems
Evaluation: user centered evaluation, percent of cognitive load
compared to search, effectiveness of interaction, quality of results


Submission Guidelines

Authors are required to provide a Portable Document Format (PDF) version of
their papers on or before September 30th, 2012 (11:59pm Samoa time, UTC-11). The submission link is https://www.softconf.com/coling2012/QASPR14/

For this workshop, the maximum length of a manuscript is 14 (A5 sized)
pages plus additional 2 pages for references, and should report original
unpublished research. Papers must conform to official COLING 2012 style
guidelines. Please use the following style files for formatting your
submissions: Latex style files, Microsoft Word style files.

Reviewing: Each long/short paper will be reviewed by three/two members from
the program committee. The final selection will be made by the committee
based on the reports of the reviewers. We will follow a double blind
reviewing policy. Therefore, all submissions should be anonymous. Please,
do not put any information that can potentially reveal the identity of the
author.

Dual submission policy: Authors can submit papers that are under review or
has been submitted to another conference/workshop. However, upon acceptance
of the paper, the authors have to decide whether they want to present the
paper at QACD or another forum.

Presentation and Participation: At least one of the authors MUST register
for the workshop to ensure the inclusion of the paper in the proceedings.
It is also expected that at least one author for each accepted submission
personally attends and presents the work at the workshop. There will be
both oral and poster presentations. The mode of presentation will be
decided later based on the suggestion of the program committee and has
nothing to do with the technical quality of the paper.


Keynotes

Prof. Doug Oard, University of Maryland, College Park
http://terpconnect.umd.edu/~oard/



Important Dates

30th September, 2012 (11:59pm Samoa time, UTC-11): Paper submission
deadline
31st October, 2012: Paper accept/reject notification
15th November, 2012: Camera ready paper due
9th December, 2012: Workshop (schedule to be uploaded soon)


Conference Committees

Organizing Committee:

Nanda Kambhatla, IBM Research - India
Sachindra Joshi, IBM Research - India
Ganesh Ramakrishnan, IIT Bombay
Kiran Kate, IBM Research - Singapore
Priyanka Agrawal, IBM Research - India


Program Committee

Raghavendra Udupa, Microsoft Research, India
Doug Oard, University of Maryland, College Park
Carolyn Rose, CMU
Indrajit Bhattacharya, IISc
Li Haizhou, Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore
Cong Gao, NTU, Singapore
Sutanu Chakraborti, IIT Madras
Rebecca Passonneau, Columbia University
Balaraman Ravindran, IIT Madras
Vasudeva Varma, IIIT Hyderabad
Ullas Nambiar, EMC India
Shourya Roy, Xerox Research, India
Radhika Mamidi, IIIT Hyderabad
Eric Brown, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center
Jennifer Chu-Carroll, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center

For any queries, please contact us at : 2012qacd at gmail dot com