Call for papers: NLA2BD

AAAI 2014 FALL SYMPOSIUM:
NATURAL LANGUAGE ACCESS TO BIG DATA
November 13–15, 2014
Westin Arlington Gateway in Arlington, Virginia adjacent to Washington, DC

Motivation and Scope:
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Today’s enterprises need to make decisions based on analyzing massive and heterogeneous data sources. More and more aspects of decision making are driven by data, and as a result, more and more business users need access to data. Offering easy access to the right data to diverse business users is of growing importance. There are several challenges that must be overcome to meet this goal. One is the sheer volume: enterprise data are predicted to grow by 800 percent in the next five years. The biggest part (80 percent) are stored in unstructured documents, most of which are lacking informative meta data or semantic tags (beyond date, size, and author) that might help in accessing them. A third challenge comes from the need to offer access to these data for different types of users, most of whom are not familiar with the underlying syntax or semantics of the data.
Natural Language Interfaces and Question Answering Systems, such as Watson, Smartweb, Siri, Start, or Evi, have been successfully implemented in various domains; for example in encyclopedic knowledge bases (e.g., IBM`s Jeopardy Challenge), in the field of energy (e.g., DGRC), or in the domain of mathematics (e.g., Wolfram Alpha). Following up on prior work in natural language interfaces to databases (NLIDB) and question answering (QA) systems, this workshop brings together experts from both academia and industry to present their most recent work related to problems that leverage natural language in the context of big data. They can share information on their latest investigations and exchange ideas and thoughts in order to push the research frontier towards new technologies that tackle the aspect of natural language access to large-scale and heterogeneous data.


Call for Papers:
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We welcome the submission of research papers on all aspects of natural language access and question answering to large-scale structured and unstructured data. The following topics are of particular interest:

• Natural language interaction technologies (e.g., in the context of knowledge navigation; personal assistant)
• Speech interfaces and interactive question answering
• Automatic question answering based on structured data sources
• Natural language access to the Semantic Web
• Question answering and natural language interfaces to Linked Data
• Formalization of structured information / queries (RDF, OWL, SPARQL)
• Machine learning techniques (e.g., large-scale hierarchical classification) for translating the users' information needs into formal queries
• Information extraction at web scale that supports natural language access
• Web mining and social network analysis
• Social media analysis and opinion mining
• Text summarization (e.g., question-focused summarization)
• Natural language processing for document analysis including information extraction, semantic role labeling and co-reference resolution
• Architectures for natural language access to big data
• UIMA modules
• Applications and projects



Format of Symposium
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The symposium will include invited talks, presentations on accepted papers, a demo/poster section with showcases for new advances in natural language access and interfaces, and an open panel discussion focusing on key issues at the end.
Accepted papers can be accompanied by a poster or demo in order to encourage a more interactive presentation of the content.



Submission Details
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Regular papers: the length of regular papers (including figures and bibliography) should not exceed 8 pages.
Poster/summary paper: the length of poster/summary papers (including all figures and
bibliography) should not exceed 4 pages.

All papers must be submitted in PDF format; camera-ready versions must be formatted according to the AAAI guidelines.

https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=nla2bd


Important Dates (extended deadline)
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• Papers due to: July 04, 2014
• Author notifications: July 11, 2014
• Symposium: November 13-15, 2014



Programm Committee
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• Gerhard Weikum
Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik, Saarbrücken, Germany

• Philipp Cimiano
Bielefeld University - CITEC, Germany

• Zornitsa Kozareva
Yahoo Research, Silicon Valley, USA

• Chris Biemann
TU Darmstadt, Germany

• Florian Röhrbein
Technische Universität München, Germany

• Saurav Sahay
Intel Labs - Experience Technology, Santa Clara, CA, USA

• Mohamed Yahya
Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik, Saarbrücken, Germany

• Maximilian Viermetz
Siemens AG - Corporate Technology, Germany

• James Fan
IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, NY, USA

• Ken Barker
IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, NY, USA

• Günter Neumann
German Research Center for AI, Saarbrücken, Germany

• Martin Theobald
University of Antwerp, Belgium

• Paul Buitelaar
Digital Enterprise Research Institute, Ireland

• Jochen Leidner
Thomson Reuters, United Kingdom

• Lora Aroyo
VU University Amsterdam, The Netherlands



Organizing Committee
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Dan G. Tecuci
Siemens Corporation / Corporate Technologies
755 College Road East
Princeton, NJ 08540, USA
Email: dan.tecuci@gmail.com
http://www.dantecuci.com

Ulli Waltinger
Siemens AG / Corporate Technology
Research & Technology Center
Business Analytics & Monitoring
Knowledge Modeling & Retrieval (CT RTC BAM KMR)
Otto-Hahn-Ring 6
81739 München, Deutschland
Email: ulli.waltinger@siemens.com

Daniel Sonntag
German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence
Intelligent User Interfaces
Stuhlsatzenhausweg 3
66123 Saarbruecken, Germany
Email: daniel.sonntag@dfki.de
http://www.dfki.de/~sonntag/


Contact
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For further information and other inquiries, please contact the workshop organizers Dan Tecuci (dan.tecuci@gmail.com), Ulli Waltinger (ulli.waltinger@siemens.com), or Daniel Sonntag (sonntag@dfki.de).