*Q4APS Call for Papers*

Workshop on “Question Answering And Activity Analysis in Participatory Sites” collocated with the international World-Wide Web Conference 2016 in Montreal
https://project.inria.fr/q4aps2016/


User-generated content and social media are increasingly exploited to support content mining, recommendation, social structure analysis, etc. However, for some kinds of online community sites such as question-and-answer sites and forums there is no explicit social network structures but instead specific discussion structures (e.g. threads) and contribution types (e.g. questions, answers, edits) that are traces of the activity of often implicit communities of interest. Community Question Answering sites (CQA) and question-answering services (Q&A) are now an important part of the information sources searched and accessed by users today to solve problems and take decisions. A famous example is the StackOverFlow website. Question-answer sites and services serve millions of users and generate an important and popular part of the Web content. In this context, being able to efficiently analyze, structure, search, automate and reuse question-answering data is an important challenge.

This workshop intends to bring together researchers and practitioners of Question Answering sites and services on the Web to present and discuss latest advances in analyzing, supporting and automating tasks of the life-cycle of such applications. The goal is to cover and bring together the different approaches existing in managing and answering natural language questions of users on the Web. This includes methods, models and algorithms from automated question-answering to question-answering forums mining, monitoring and management automation. In this context, the workshop welcomes submissions of original, high-quality papers focused on question-answering site and services.

Topics covered by the workshop include the following:
- question routing, question answering
- question and answer recommendation
- question and need analysis, question modeling
- expert finding, expertise categorization, expertise labeling
- debate analysis, argument mining, argument schemes
- moderating support and automation
- animation fostering, targeted solicitation and notification
- answer generation, multiple and/or heterogeneous answer sources
- answer detection and ranking, best answer identification
- answer building and answer improving
- questions and expert topic labeling
- role detection (questioner, answerer, editor, etc.), user modeling
- social aspects of question answering
- fact checking, cross-validation, supporting evidence
- spam or abuse prevention in questions and answers
- answer personalization
- challenges, datasets, benchmarks for question-answering evaluation

Paper Submission:
The submission and reviews will follow a classical peer-review process using EasyChair. Each paper will be reviewed by at least three PC members.
We solicit full research papers (6-8 pages), and short papers (3-4 pages) both in the ACM conference paper style. Papers should be submitted to the Q4APS2016 EasyChair account:

https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=q4aps2016

All submitted papers must be written in English, be formatted according to the ACM SIG Proceedings template and be in a PDF format that can be viewed on any platform.
http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates

Submissions should be non-anonymous; they will be peer-reviewed by at least three independent reviewers. Accepted papers will be presented at the workshop and included in the workshop proceedings.
Accepted workshop papers will be published in the WWW companion proceedings and will be available from the ACM Digital Library. This may be regarded as prior publications by other conferences or journals.
For inclusion in the proceedings, at least one author of the accepted paper has to register for the conference and to attend the workshop.
Presenters are encouraged to bring demos to the workshop to enhance oral discussions and presentations.

Schedule
- Due date for full workshop papers submission: January 11th 2016
- Notification of paper acceptance to authors: February 2nd 2016
- Camera-ready of accepted papers: February 8th 2016
- Workshop: April 11, 12 or 13, 2016