Workshop on Interactive Question Answering http://www.ils.albany.edu/IQA06/ 8th & 9th June 2006 - New York City, USA to be held as part of the HLT-NAACL conference in New York City (http://nlp.cs.nyu.edu/hlt-naacl06/) --------------- IMPORTANT DATES --------------- Full Paper Submission: March 3rd, 2006 Acceptance Notification: March 31st, 2006 Camera-Ready Papers due: April 21st, 2006 Workshop: June 8th & 9th, 2006 ----------- DESCRIPTION ----------- In moving from factoid Question Answering (QA) to answering complex questions, it has become apparent that insufficient attention has been paid to the user's role in the process, other than as a source of one- shot factual questions or a sequence of related questions. Rather, users both want to and can do a lot more: With respect to answers, users can usually disambiguate between a range of possible factoid answers and/or navigate information clusters in an answer space; With respect to the QA process, users want to ask more types of questions and respond to the system's answer in more ways than another factual question. In short, real users demand real-time interactive question and answer capabilities, with coherent targeted answers presented in context for easy inspection. Repeat users will require user models that treat information already provided as background to novel information that is now available. Such developments move the paradigm of QA away from single question, single answer modalities, toward interactive QA, where the system may retain memory of the QA process, and where users develop their understanding of a situation through an interactive QA dialogue. Dialogue systems already allow users to interact with simple, structured data such as train or flight timetables, using a dialogue component based on variations of finite-state models. Such models make intensive use of the structure of the domain to constrain the range of possible interactions. To move forward, one needs the combined capabilities of dialogue systems and open-domain QA systems. We therefore solicit papers relevant to achieving this goal, which may touch on one or more of the following key issues: ---------- KEY ISSUES ---------- (1) Models of the domain - a priori models which give a deeper, more consistent representation of the data - models built on the fly, which may be shallower, or more coarse grain, but which may be sufficient to conduct interactions over a wide range of data (2) Models of dialogue - Using domain knowledge to conduct and constrain interactions appropriately - Generic, generally-applicable types of QA interactions - clarification sub-dialogues, error-correcting dialogues and negotiation dialogues (3) Integration - Using dialogue models in open-domain QA (for question expansion, answer candidate ranking, etc.) - Integrating closed and open domain QA to support dialogue (3) Answer presentation - enable the user to understand the range of choices, or the complexity of the data (4) Evaluation - user centred evaluation - subjective component to measure: - effectiveness of interaction - quality of results - percent of cognitive load compared to alternative search mechanisms -------------------------- ROADMAP FOR INTERACTIVE QA -------------------------- The goal of this two day workshop is to explore the area of dialogue as applied to the QA scenario, to extend current technology beyond factoid QA. We would like the workshop to produce some tangible output, at the very least a blueprint for the potential development of the field. Each of the keynote speakers will add something to the discussion about the future direction of interactive QA (or past developments), relating to the four research goals listed above. During these presentations, and the presentations of the participants, notes will be taken about research priorities, existing systems, methodologies and principles. At the end of the workshop, there will be a discussion section to produce a roadmap for the future development of interactive QA systems. This roadmap will be circulated to participants after the event. Such a roadmap has many potential uses - including galvanising research funding bodies to support efforts in the suggested areas. ---------------- KEYNOTE SPEAKERS ---------------- The invited keynote speakers to this workshop are intended to set the scene for the range of papers which follow. Keynote speakers will include: Bill Woods (SUN Microsystems) Heather McCallum-Bayliss (ARDA) Jim Hieronymous (NASA) Tomek Strzalkowski (SUNY, Albany) ------------- PARTICIPATION ------------- This workshop aims to bring together practitioners from a variety of disciplines - Information Retrieval, QA and Dialogue Systems - to highlight the challenges and range of potential solutions to the now reborn, still young, but growing interactive QA community. To do so at an early stage of interactive system development can help researchers to understand the full range of techniques, approaches and toolkits available >From different research communities. ----------- SUBMISSIONS ----------- Authors are required to provide a Portable Document Format (PDF) version of their papers. The submission must be electronic. The proceedings will be printed on US-Letter paper. Manuscripts must be in two-column format of ACL proceedings (11pt Times-Roman font). Exceptions to the two-column format include the title, authors' names and complete addresses, which must be centred at the top of the first page, and any full-width figures or tables. For the workshop, the maximum length of a manuscript is eight (8) pages for full papers printed single-sided. Authors are strongly encouraged to use the LaTeX style files or MSWord equivalents available >From http://nlp.cs.nyu.edu/hlt-naacl06/styles/. Tom make a submission, please use the START server, located at: http://www.softconf.com/start/HLT-WS06-IQA/ ----------------- PROGRAM COMMITTEE ----------------- - Roberto Basili (University of Rome, Tor Vergata) - John Donelan (AQUAINT Technical Steering Committee) - Sanda Harabagiu (LCC) - Ryuichiro Higashinaka (NTT) - Udo Kruschwitz (University of Essex) - Oliver Lemon (University of Edinburgh) - Steven Maiorano (AQUAINT Technical Steering Committee) - Joe Polifroni (University of Sheffield) - Sharon Small (SUNY, Albany) - David Traum (ICT) - Nick Webb (SUNY, Albany) - Bonnie Webber (University of Edinburgh)