Workshop Program: http://languagecomputer.com/hltnaacl04qa/program.pdf
Main conference: www.hlt-naacl04.org
Dr. John Prange's presentation slides are available on-line here.
| WEB SITES |
Workshop: http://languagecomputer.com/hltnaacl04qa
Workshop Program: http://languagecomputer.com/hltnaacl04qa/program.pdf
Main conference: www.hlt-naacl04.org
Dr. John Prange's presentation slides are available on-line here.
| DESCRIPTION |
Research in Open-domain Question Answering (QA) has made substantial advances in the past few years. Answering factual questions is performed with better and better accuracy; multiple forms of definition questions are processed correctly, and list questions retrieve sequences of answers with good recall from large text collections. Evaluations in the Text REtrieval Conference (TREC) QA track, as well as ARDA's Advanced Question Answering for Intelligence (AQUAINT) program, enable these advances in QA. These results and some of the research that made them possible were discussed in various workshops on QA topics organized at ACL (2001 and 2003), COLING (2002), LREC (2002), EACL (2003) and the AAAI Spring Symposium series (2002 and 2003). In the past year, with the emergence of scenario-based questions, several forms of pragmatic processing have started to influence the architecture of QA systems. The processing requires multiple interactions with a QA system in the context of a given scenario. Questions need to be decomposed in the context of the scenario. Furthermore, context plays an important role in interaction with the user background. These are just a few of the new features required in QA systems processing complex questions.
This workshop will be a forum for researchers to discuss and present their results in the new area of QA that moves beyond fact-seeking into resolving complex questions. The topics that will be discussed are:
A highlight of the workshop is the keynote speech.
| KEYNOTE SPEAKER: Dr. John Prange, Director of the AQUAINT Program, ARDA (presentation slides - 2.6MB pdf file) |
| PAPER SUBMISSION |
Submissions should describe original, unpublished work. Papers are limited to 8 pages. Submissions should use the style files available on the main HLT/NAACL2004 conference web site. No author information should be included in the papers since reviewing will be blind. Papers not conforming to these requirements are subject to rejection without review.
Submissions should be sent electronically (pdf or postscript) to finley@languagecomputer.com. Submissions consist of (1) the paper; and (2) a separate id page including the title, authors, a short abstract, and a set of relevant keywords. The subject line should be "HLT/NAACL QA paper submission" for paper submissions, and "HLT/NAACL QA id page" for id page submission.
| ORGANIZERS |
Sanda Harabagiu, University of Texas at Dallas (sanda@cs.utdallas.edu)
Finley Lacatusu, Language Computer Corporation (finley@languagecomputer.com)
| IMPORTANT DATES |
| Paper submission deadline: | February 8 |
| Notification of acceptance: | February 20 |
| Camera ready papers due: | February 27 |
| Workshop dates: | May 6-7 |
| PROGRAM COMMITTEE |
| Stefano Bertolo | Cycorp |
| Vasileios Hatzivassiloglou | Columbia University |
| Eduard Hovy | USC/Information Sciences Institute |
| Elisabeth Liddy | Syracuse University |
| Steven Maiorano | ATP |
| Christopher Manning | Stanford University |
| Daniel Marcu | USC/Information Sciences Institute |
| Mark Maybury | MITRE |
| Dan Moldovan | Language Computer Corporation |
| Srini Narayanan | ICSI Berkeley |
| Hwee Tou Ng | National University of Singapore |
| John Prager | IBM |
| Tomek Strzalkowski | University at Albany |
| Ellen Voorhees | NIST |
| Jinxi Xu | BBN |