AKBC 2019
1st Conference on Automated Knowledge Base Construction (AKBC)
May 20-22, 2019, Monday-Wednesday, Amherst, MA
www: http://www.akbc.ws ; email: info@akbc.ws

Key dates
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November 16, 2018, Friday: Conference paper submissions due
January 11, Friday: Workshop topics announced
February 15, 2019, Friday: Conference notification
May 20-21, 2019, Monday-Tuesday: Conference, UMass Amherst
May 22, 2019, Wednesday: Workshops, UMass Amherst

Knowledge Base Construction
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Knowledge gathering, representation, and reasoning are among the fundamental challenges of artificial intelligence. Large-scale repositories of knowledge about entities, relations, and their abstractions are known as “knowledge bases”. Most major technology companies now have substantial efforts in knowledge base construction, and related scholarly work spans many research areas, including machine learning, natural language processing, computer vision, information integration, databases, search, data mining, knowledge representation, human computation, human-computer interfaces, and fairness. The AKBC conference serves as a research forum for all these areas, in both academia and industry.

New Conference
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Nearly ten years after the first AKBC workshop in Grenoble, France, AKBC is becoming a conference. Why a new stand-alone conference?
- Long-standing and growing interest in the area, now with too much material for a one-day workshop. We have sufficient material for a two-day conference plus topical workshops.
- We want to grow and connect the community beyond existing individual conference communities, bringing together ML, NLP, DB, IR, KRR, semantics, reasoning, common sense, QA, human computation, dialog, HCI.
- We want to set our own culture, including reviewing practices, and meeting format. We have fond memories of the first AKBC 2010 in Grenoble: a two-day meeting that included an afternoon hike in the Alps with much great scientific discussion.
- Why now? Growing interest across many areas. Disconnect among multiple relevant communities. Growing industry and government interest.

Call For Papers
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We invite the submission of papers describing previously unpublished research, including new methodology, datasets, evaluations, surveys, reproduced results, negative results, and visionary positions.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
- Natural language processing, information extraction, extraction of entities, relations, and events, semantic parsing, coreference, machine reading, entailment, web mining, multilingual NLP.
- Information integration, entity resolution, schema & ontology alignment, text and structure alignment, federated KBs, Semantic Web.
- Machine learning, supervised, unsupervised, lightly-supervised and distantly-supervised learning, deep learning, symbolic learning, multimodal learning, embeddings of knowledge.
- Search, question-answering, reasoning, knowledge base completion, queries on mixtures of structured and unstructured data; querying under uncertainty.
- Multi-modal knowledge bases: structured data, text, images, video, audio.
Human-computer interaction, crowdsourcing, interactive learning.
- Fairness, accountability, transparency, misinformation, multiple viewpoints, uncertainty.
- Databases, probabilistic databases, distributed databases, database cleaning, scalable computation, distributed computation, dynamic data, online adaptation of knowledge.
Systems, languages and toolkits, demonstrations of existing knowledge bases.
- Evaluation of AKBC, datasets, evaluation methodology.

Authors of accepted papers will have the option for their conference paper to be archival (with full text in AKBC Proceedings, and be considered for best paper awards) or non-archival (listed in AKBC Conference schedule, with full text in OpenReview, and the flexibility to also submit elsewhere). Double-blind reviewing will be performed on the OpenReview platform, with papers, reviews and comments publicly visible, much like ICLR 2018.

Papers should be submitted in JAIR format (which is single-column), restricted to 15 pages excluding references (the equivalent of about 8 pages double column).

Submission site: http://www.akbc.ws/2019/submission

Dual Submission Policy: Submissions that are identical (or substantially similar) to versions that have been previously published, or accepted for publication, are not allowed and violate our dual submission policy. However, papers that cite previous related work by the authors and papers that have appeared on non-peered reviewed websites (like arXiv) or that have been presented at workshops (i.e., venues that do not have publication proceedings) do not violate the policy. The policy is enforced during the whole reviewing process period.

Invited Talks
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Waleed Ammar (AI2)
Danqi Chen (Princeton)
Yejin Choi (UW, AI2)
Laura Dietz (UNH)
Lise Getoor (UCSC)
Alexandra Meliou (UMass)
Ndapa Nakashole (UCSD)
Fernando Pereira (Google)
Hoifung Poon (MSR)
Chris Re (Stanford and Apple)
Sebastian Riedel (UCL and Facebook)
Guy Van den Broeck (UCLA)
Claudia Wagner (Leibniz Institute for Social Sciences)
Chris Welty (Google)

Workshops
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In addition to the two-day conference program, we will have a one-day collection of workshops on focused topics. Rather than accepting disjoint workshop proposals, this year we will have a community-driven process for devising workshop topics and organizers. Please visit http://www.akbc.ws/2019/workshops/ for more details.

Organizers
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General Chair Andrew McCallum, University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA

Program Co-chair Isabelle Augenstein, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Program Co-chair Sameer Singh, University of California Irvine, USA

Workshop Co-chair Xiang Ren, USC, USA
Workshop Co-chair Partha Pratim Talukdar, IISc, Bangalore, India

Funding Chair Sebastian Riedel, University College London, UK

Local Co-chair Ari Kobren, University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA
Local Co-chair Nicholas Monath, University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA

Questions? Please mail info@akbc.ws.