First International Workshop on eXPErt RecommendaTion for Community Question Answering (XPERT4CQA)
Workshop website: http://xpert4cqa.icar.cnr.it/

in conjunction with
The 20th IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology
https://www.wi-iat.com/wi-iat2021/



December 14-17, 2021, Melbourne, Australia

Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, WI-IAT’21 will be held as a Hybrid Conference with both Online and Offline Modes.


About XPERT4CQA
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Community question answering is a fundamental knowledge sharing service, with a strong impact on society. Essentially, the askers of a community post questions and rely upon the wisdom and collective intelligence of the repliers in that community, for their questions to be timely and effectively answered. Unfortunately, because of the growing number of both unanswered and newly-posted questions, repliers cannot timely answer, while askers do not necessarily receive satisfactory answers even after a long time. Expert recommendation is the process aimed to the timely sharing of high-quality knowledge from answerers to askers, which allows for routing questions to the most trustworthy expert repliers. This workshop proposal aims to provide a premier international forum on all aspects of interest to expert recommendation for community question answering. In particular, the workshop will
- bring together practitioners and researchers from academia and industry, to discuss challenges, practices, principles and preliminary results, share ideas, develop innovative models, methods, techniques and tools;
- provide a venue, where participants form an interdisciplinary research community, promoting scientific cooperation and exchanges within and across areas, for unprecedented synergistic insights and approaches;
- advance research, through a focused analysis of open issues, emerging trends, unexplored directions and novel solutions.


Scope and Topics of Interest
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Because of an increasing interest in academia and industry, expert recommendation for community question answering has grown into an active area of multidisciplinary research, with a vast body of contributions at the crossroads of Recommender Systems, Information Retrieval, Data Mining, Machine Learning, Data Science, Knowledge Representation, Knowledge Management, Social Computing and Natural Language Processing. The workshop will solicit contributions reporting original and unpublished results regarding theoretical developments, principled models, methods, techniques and algorithms, experimental results, empirical evaluations of state-of-the-art approaches, evaluation metrics, experiences with new systems and related challenges, new data sets and respective analytics, application-oriented studies, promising preliminary ideas, work in progress, demonstrations and tools. All submissions will be reviewed, by rigorously accounting for their appropriateness and relevance to the workshop as well as the novelty, importance, technical soundness and clarity of their contributions.

The topics of interest for the workshop include, but are not limited to, the following:

1. Topical interest, topical expertise, authority, centrality, relevance, social roles, trustworthiness, confidence.
2. (Advanced) Modeling of Users, Roles and Behaviors
3. Question routing/Expert finding
4. Exploitation of External non-CQA Data
5. Dynamicity
6. Answerer Motivation
7. Exposure to Questions
8. Recommendation of Newcomers and Lurkers
9. Recommendation of Expert Answerers using Knowledge Graphs
10. Recommendation of Expert Answerers for Context-dependent Questions
11. Recommendation of Collaborative Groups of Expert Answerers


Important Dates
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Workshop papers: September 30th, 2021
Author Notification: October 15th, 2021
Camera-ready version of accepted paper submissions: October 25th, 2021

Guidelines
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There are 2 types of paper submissions, that are possible.
Type 1: Full Paper Submissions. Papers need to have up to 10 pages in LNCS format. All full-length papers accepted will be published by Springer as a volume of the series of LNCS/LNAI.
Type 2: Abstract Submissions. Abstracts have a word limit of 500 words. Experimental research is particularly welcome.

http://xpert4cqa.icar.cnr.it/?page_id=701



Best Paper Award and Special Issue
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Authors of best manuscripts will be eligible for the workshop best paper award. They will also be invited to extend their work for peer-reviewed publication in a forthcoming Special Issue of a renowned international journal.