***************************************
                      C A L L   F O R   P A P E R S
                      
     AAAI-2005 Workshop on Inference for Textual Question Answering
                                 July 9, 2005
                            Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
                            
              ***********************************************

Research in textual Question Answering has made substantial advances in
the past few years. The state-of-the art in answering textual
questions is beyond keyword matching. Processing of complex questions
requires multiple forms of inference, e.g. abductions, default
reasoning, inference with epistemic logic or description
logic. Additionally, there are also forms of inference that are
typical to language interpretation, e.g. conversational implicatures,
processing of metonymies and metaphors. Often, the answer to questions
involves temporal and spatial reasoning.

The challenge addressed by this workshop is posed by the
identification, discussion and comparison of different inference
mechanisms that operate on knowledge structures automatically derived
from questions or candidate answers. Unlike inference schemes devised
for manually-crafted knowledge, inference methods for Question
Answering need to be robust, cover all ambiguities of language and
operate on pragmatic information extracted from textual data. An
important component of the workshop will be the discussion of
available knowledge sources that can be used for inference of textual
answers. This workshop constitutes an occasion of bringing together
researchers from the Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KRR)
community with researchers that work in Natural Language Processing (NLP).


ORGANIZING COMMITTEE:
Sanda Harabagiu (University of Texas at Dallas)
Dan Moldovan (University of Texas at Dallas)
Srini Narayanan (ICSI Berkeley) 
Christofer Manning (Stanford University)
Daniel Bobrow (PARC)
Ken Forbus (Northwestern University)

PROGRAM COMMITTEE:
Chitta Baral (Arizona State University)
Daniel Bobrow (PARC)
Ken Forbus (Northwestern University)
Michael Gelfond (Texas Tech University)
Sanda Harabagiu (University of Texas at Dallas)
Jerry Hobbs (University of Southern California/ISI)
Ron Kaplan (PARC)
Lauri Karttunen (PARC)
Boris Katz (MIT)
Daphne Koller (Stanford University)
Steve Maiorano (ATP)
Inderjeet Mani (Georgetown University)
Christopher Manning (Stanford University)
Dan Moldovan (University of Texas at Dallas)
Srini Narayanan (ICSI Berkeley)
Andrew Ng (Stanford University)
Dan Roth (University of Illinois at Urbana-Chapaign)
Richard Waldinger (SRI International)
Michael Witbrock (CYC Corporation)

.............................................................................
SUBMISSION PROCEDURE

Submitted papers should describe original work, completed or in
progress, rather than merely planned, and clearly indicate the current
state of advancement of the work. No previously published papers
should be submitted. Authors should submit regular papers of maximum
10 pages or short papers of maximum 5 pages, including references and
figures, following the AAAI technical reports guidelines. The review
will not be blind. Submissions must be in PS or PDF format only.

Forms and templates for use by authors when submitting the paper can
be found at: http://www.aaai.org/Publications/instructions.html

Submissions should be sent electronically to cathie@hlt.utdallas.edu.
The email should have in the subject line: AAAI-05 Workshop Submission

For continuously updated information about the workshop, please visit:
http://www.hlt.utdallas.edu/~cristina/workshop05/
_________________________________________________________________________
IMPORTANT DATES

Paper submission deadline:	April 20, 2005
Notification of acceptance for papers:	May 11, 2005
Camera ready papers due:	May 18, 2005
Workshop date:	July 9, 2005