CALL FOR PAPERS SPECIAL ISSUE of COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS on QUESTION ANSWERING IN RESTRICTED DOMAINS GUEST EDITORS * Diego Moll=E1 Macquarie University diego@ics.mq.edu.au * Jos=E9 Luis Vicedo Alicante University vicedo@dlsi.ua.es TOPIC AREA In early descriptions of AI problems, question answering (QA) was typically used to illustrate Natural Language Understanding (NLU) tasks. It could be argued that QA is an ideal task to advance knowledge in inference, NLU, and Computational Linguistics (CL) in general. There has been a recent surge of interest in research in QA, but much of that research focuses on the mining of answers from open-domain text collections. A consequence of this focused research is the development of redundancy-based techniques that take advantage of the enormous amount of information found in large corpora. Some concerns have been raised as to whether the use of large corpora and generic open-domain document sets is appropriate as a way to advance research in natural language processing (NLP). The use of restricted domains, on the other hand, presents interesting challenges and opportunities that may take research to a new stage. A clear challenge to the use of restricted domains (e.g. law, medicine, technical manuals) is the diversity of these domains. Different domains may present different stylistic conventions. Also, restricted domains may use terminology that is not stored in conventional lexical resources. As a consequence, approaches devised for open-domain systems may encounter difficulties when applied to these specific domains, thus raising the question of how portable and re-usable these systems can be, and, on the other hand, which kinds of additional or new NLP techniques are needed. The most salient opportunities derive from the nature of the restricted domains and the sorts of questions that are asked in these domains. Restricted domains enable the development and use of knowledge and lexical resources that would be impossible to produce for open domains. Moreover, the kind of questions users desire to pose to the QA system are dependent on the domain, and typically they require a more complex processing than the "factual" questions generally used in the common evaluations of open-domain QA. Restricted domains are therefore ideal for the development of logic-based approaches and the integration of reasoning methods that would handle questions requiring complex inferences. TOPICS OF INTEREST -Comparisons between open-domain and restricted-domain QA. -Characterisations of types of domains and technology required for QA on those domains. -Portability of QA systems between different domains. -Generation of answers from multiple documents. -Use of ontologies. -Inference and reasoning. -Question and information source analysis and representation. -Knowledge representation. -Answer validation. -Question type classification and analysis. -Evaluation. Papers should not simply describe an existing system. Of primary interest is the theoretical basis of the work presented. We will especially welcome papers that show the impact of the above topics on aspects of QA in restricted domains that may give an insight towards advanced research in CL and NLP. SCHEDULE 31 Jan 2005 - Call for papers issued 4 Jul 2005 - Papers due 17 Oct 2005 - Notification to authors SUBMISSION PROCESS Only electronic submission will be accepted. All submissions should be sent to the CL journal in accordance with the instructions provided at http://www.aclweb.org/cl/; in the subject line of your email, please ensure that you indicate that the paper is intended for the QA Special Issue. In addition to following the procedure described on the web site, authors should also send the abstract of their paper electronically to the two guest editors: , . Questions about the submission process should be addressed to diego@ics.mq.edu.au. Each submitted paper will be reviewed by two reviewers appointed by the editor of CL and by two reviewers selected by the guest editors.