Guest Editors

Marie-Francine Moens, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium.
Patrick Saint-Dizier, IRIT, France

Important dates

• Submissions of articles: April 1, 2009
• Notification to authors: July 9, 2009
• Final version of accepted papers: September 30, 2009

Introduction

Question answering regards a sophisticated form of information retrieval characterized by information needs that are expressed as natural language statements or questions. In contrast to classical information retrieval where complete documents are considered relevant to the information need, in question answering specific pieces of information are returned as an answer. Often, automated reasoning is needed to identify correct answers.

Question answering has its roots decades ago when natural language interfaces to data or knowledge bases were researched. Today, such older technologies are blown in a new life, when we witness the growing power of e.g. searching multimedia data (e.g., images, video, text, audio) combined with natural language expressions, and making inferences over content recognized in text or the other media.

In this special issue we would like to compose a collection of state of the art question answering papers which address the problem from different angles, but are united by the recent technologies for automatically recognizing content in the textual sources and the semi-automatic recognition in other media sources, and by the knowledge representation and reasoning paradigms used. Some more practical issues such as presentation of answers, scalability issues and indexing structures for question answering might also be addressed.

We particularly welcome submissions on, but not limited to, the following topics:

• Natural language processing for question analysis:
  • Question analysis, semantic role labeling
  • How to deal with complex questions
• Natural language processing for document analysis
  • Information extraction, semantic role labeling, coreference resolution and content linking
  • Discourse analysis
• Multimedia processing for question answering
  • Content recognition in images, video, audio and text
  • Recognition and resolution of spatial and temporal relationships
  • Applications of multimedia question answering
• Knowledge representations and reasoning strategies
  • Formal content representations
  • Reasoning and matching strategies
  • Constraint processing and relaxation
  • Textual inference
  • Handling incompleteness and uncertainty
  • Probabilistic inferencing
  • Data fusion
• Speech interfaces and interactive question answering
  • Improved user models through speech interaction
  • Dealing with noisy and uncertain question transcripts
  • Interaction design
  • Dialogue and question answering
• Text and multimedia answer generation
  • Response production: summarisation, fusion, co-operativity
  • Data indexing structures and scalability

Submissions

Submissions for the special topic issue should be high-quality manuscripts on the theoretical, empirical and methodological issues surrounding question answering information retrieval. Submissions should describe original research and not be under consideration in any other forum.

All submissions should be formatted according to the Information Processing & Management guidelines for papers, references, and citations and should be submitted using the Elsevier Editorial System for Information Processing and Management.

To ensure that all manuscripts are correctly identified for inclusion into the special issue, it is important that authors select Special Issue: Question Answering when they reach the "Article Type" step in the submission process. Please visit page: http://ees.elsevier.com/ipm/default.asp

Submitted articles will be reviewed according to the Information Processing & Management reviewing criteria and appropriateness to the special topic issue.

Contact

Contact Patrick Saint-Dizier (stdizier at irit.fr) or Marie-Francine Moens (sien.moens at cs.kuleuven.be) for further information on the CFP. The program committee will be composed of experts who served on the program committees of the past and current KRAQ workshops.

Programme Committee

• Pierre Andrews, University of York, UK
• Johan Bos, University of Roma "La Sapienza", Italy
• Gosse Bouma, University of Groningen, The Netherlands
• Harry Bunt, University of Tilburg, The Netherlands
• Mohand Boughanem, IRIT, France
• Li Chunping, Tsinghua University, China
• Aron Culotta, Southeastern Louisiana University, USA
• Bojana Dalbelo Basic, University of Zagreb, Croatia
• Susan Gauch, University of Arkansas, USA
• Floriana Grasso, University of Liverpool, UK
• Sanda Harabagiu, University of Texas, USA
• Jimmy Lin, University of Maryland, USA
• Jochen L. Leidner, Thompson Corporation, USA
• Christina Lioma, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium
• Mark Maybury, MITRE, USA
• Marie-Francine Moens, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium
• Silvia Quarteroni, University of Trento, Italy
• Patrick Saint-Dizier, IRIT, France
• Tinne Tuytelaars, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium
• Daniel Kayser, Université Paris Nord, France
• Sebastian Varges, University of Trento, Italy
• Michael Wiegand, Saarland University, Germany.