*** Apologies for multiple postings ***


Artificial Intelligence Journal

Special Issue on
"Artificial Intelligence, Wikipedia and Semi-Structured Resources"

GUEST EDITORS: Eduard Hovy, Roberto Navigli, Simone Paolo Ponzetto
http://www.cl.uni-heidelberg.de/~ponzetto/aij/


CALL FOR PAPERS

The availability of large amounts of wide-coverage semantic knowledge,
and the ability to extract it using the powerful new statistical machine
learning techniques developed and used in various branches of AI, is
making possible significant advances in applications that require deep
understanding capabilities such as question-answering engines and dialogue
systems. Though well-known problems such as high cost and scalability
discouraged the development of knowledge-rich approaches in the past, more
recently the increasing availability of online collaborative resources
has attracted the attention of much work in the AI community.
Collaboratively constructed knowledge repositories have in fact been
used as wide-coverage sources of semi-structured information and manual
annotations. When coupled with free-form natural language information,
these resources enable the development of large-scale structured resources
using knowledge-lean applications. Wikipedia is a case in point, being the
largest and most popular collaborative and multilingual resource of world
and linguistic knowledge that contains unstructured and (semi-)structured
information.

This special issue aims to collect state-of-the-art contributions to the
development and use of hybrid (structured, semi-structured, and
unstructured) resources in AI. These include, but are not limited to,
semi-structured encyclopedic resources such as Wikipedia (and related
projects such as Wiktionary), user-generated answer repositories such as
Wiki and Yahoo! Answers, and collaborative tagging efforts on social media
platforms such as Flickr and Blogger. Hybrid knowledge resources such as
Wikipedia enable the development of methods for extracting, bootstrapping
and integrating fully structured, machine-readable knowledge from both
unstructured and semi-structured origins. Such induced wide-coverage
knowledge is expected to prove beneficial for a variety of AI tasks, as well
as the Semantic Web. We are particularly interested in articles showing the
benefits of using such resources and AI techniques synergistically. We thus
welcome contributions dealing with applications of general AI methodologies
for the construction and validation of large-scale machine-readable
knowledge repositories and the impact of automatically-extracted knowledge
for AI applications. We also encourage contributors to investigate the
nature and impact of the structured and unstructured parts of the resource
(e.g. information redundancy, overlaps, connections, etc.).


TOPICS

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

* Using Wikipedia and other semi-structured content in AI tasks.
Examples include Word Sense Disambiguation, Information Retrieval,
Information Extraction, Question Answering, etc.
* Automatic transformation of hybrid knowledge repositories into
fully-structured resources
* Extraction and formalization of information from hybrid resources
into knowledge bases and databases
* Automatic integration of semi-structured knowledge repositories with
structured resources (e.g. Cyc, WordNet, SUMO)
* Enriching encyclopedic and semi-structured entries with new types of
structural information
* Wikipedia and the Semantic Web
* Automatic extraction and use of cross-lingual information, and other
multilingual aspects of Wikipedias and Wiktionaries in AI
* Knowledge acquisition from collaborative user contributions
* AI methods for improving the quality of (semi-)structured
user contributions


SUBMISSION INFORMATION

Deadline for submissions: October 31, 2010. Please follow the submission
instructions available from the AIJ webpage under Submit Article
at http://ees.elsevier.com/artint/

For additional information, please contact Simone Paolo Ponzetto
(lastname@cl.uni-heidelberg.de).


IMPORTANT DATES

* Submission deadline: October 31, 2010
* First-round reviews due: January 31, 2011
* Revised versions due: May 30, 2011
* Second-round reviews due: June 30, 2011
* Final versions due: July 31, 2011
* Special issue publication: Fall 2011