===================================================================
BioASQ Workshop
Website: http://www.bioasq.org/news/bioasq-workshop
Project URL: http://www.bioasq.org/
Post-conference workshop after CLEF 2013, September 27, Valencia, Spain
===================================================================

*Scope*

Every day, we generate 2.5 quintillion bytes of data. In domains such as bio-medicine, approximately 3000 new articles are published on the Web every day. This averages to more than 2 articles every minute. In addition to the sheer amount of information available on the Web, the variety of this information increases everyday and ranges for structured data in the form of ontologies to unstructured data in the form of documents. Staying on top of this huge amount of diverse data requires methods that allow detecting and integrating portions of datasets that satisfy the information need of given users from sources such as documents, ontologies, Linked Data sets, etc. Developing tools to achieve this bold goal requires combining techniques from several disciplines including Natural Language Processing (e.g., question answering, document summarization, ontology verbalization), Information Retrieval (e.g., document and passage retrieval), Machine Learning (e.g., large-scale hierarchical classification, clustering, etc.), Semantic Web/Linked Data (e.g., reasoning, link discovery) and Databases (e.g., storage and retrieval of triples, indexing, etc.).

The aim of the BioASQ workshop is to bring experts from these domains together in order to push the research frontier towards hybrid information systems that will be able to deal with the whole diversity of the Web, especially for, but not restricted to the context of bio-medicine. During the workshop, the results of the open BioASQ challenge will also be presented.

The topics of interest include (but are not restricted to):

Large-scale hierarchical text classification
Large-scale classification of documents onto ontology concepts (semantic indexing)
Classification of questions onto ontological concepts
Scalable approaches to document clustering
Text summarization, especially multi-document and query-focused summarization
Verbalization of structured information and related queries (RDF, OWL, SPARQL, etc.)
Question Answering over structured, semi-structured and unstructured data
Reasoning for information retrieval and question answering
Information retrieval over fragmented sources of information
Efficient indexing and storage structures for information retrieval
Delivery of the retrieved information in a concise and user-understandable form

Papers are to be submitted in the LNCS format. We accept both short (max. 6 pages) and long submissions (max. 12 pages). All submissions must be carried out on EasyChair (https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=bioasq2013). The proceedings will be published at http://ceur-ws.org/.

*Important dates*

Submission Deadline: August 15th, 2013
Notification of acceptance/rejection: August 31st, 2013
Camera-Ready Deadline: September 15th, 2013
Workshop: September 27th, 2013

*Organization*

The BioASQ project, led by George Paliouras, NCSR “Demokritos”, Greece.