The 3rd International Workshop on Natural Language Interfaces for Web of Data (NLIWoD)
And the 8th Question Answering over Linked Data (QALD) Challenge
October 21 (Saturday) or 22 (Sunday), Vienna, Austria

While the amount of Linked Open Data (LOD) increases rapidly, it is still used mostly by Semantic Web experts. There are two main obstacles to making the billions of RDF triples already available accessible for common Web users: (1) the need to learn the query language SPARQL, and (2) the need to know the schemas underlying the datasets. Approaches to ease the access to the Web of Data include graphical query interfaces, agent-based systems, and natural language interfaces. Amongst them, natural language interfaces are receiving an increasing interest due to its high expressive power and low cost for educational purposes. Recent progresses in speech recognition technologies (e.g., Siri and Google Voice) also demonstrate the usefulness of a natural language interface. The goal of this workshop is to bring together experts on the use of natural-language interfaces (NLI) for accessing the Web of Data.

NLIWoD 2017’s goal is to bring together experts on the use of natural-language interfaces (NLI) for answering questions especially over the Web of Data.

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

- NEW! Dialogue systems
- NEW! Personal assistants
- NEW! Chatbots
- Question answering over Linked Data
- Benchmarking natural language interfaces
- Term matching and entity disambiguation
- Browsing Linked Data
- Indexing for question answering
- Deep Learning for Natural Language Interaction
- SPARQL query pattern generation
- Schema-agnostic query generation
- Discovery of Linked Data sources
- Endpoint profiling
- Dealing with data and schema heterogeneity
- Providing justifications of answers and conveying trust
- Knowledge base design for question answering
- Language resources and NLP software for question answering
- Reasoning for question answering
- Natural language querying of RDF exposed as Linked Data
- Natural language querying of Web services
- User feedback and interaction

## Important Dates
Paper submission due: August 8th (Sunday), 2017 (Anywhere on Earth)
Author notification: August 24th (Thursday), 2017
Workshop: October 21st (Saturday) or 22nd (Sunday), 2017

## Submission Instructions
NLIWoD 2017 solicits the submission of original research papers in two types:
- Full paper submissions (up to 16 pages) must describe substantial and original work.
- Short paper submissions (up to 8 pages) must describe an original work which may present
- A small, focused contribution,
- A work in progress, or
- An interesting application case.
- Demos and posters presentations (up to 4 pages)

All submissions must be in English and in PDF formatted the style of the Springer Publications format for Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS). For details on the LNCS style, see Springer's Author Instructions. All papers are to be submitted via EasyChair https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=nliwod3 . All submissions will be peer-reviewed by the Program Committee of the workshop. Submissions do not need to be anonymous.

## Challenge
In addition to participating with innovative research, participants are cordially invited to participate with tools. NLIWOD incorporates the 8th Question Answering over Linked Data (QALD) where users can display the capabilities of their systems using the provided online benchmarking platform GERBIL QA support by the H2020 project HOBBIT. More information at https://sites.google.com/site/nliwod3/challenge.

The timeline is as follows:
- System integration with HOBBIT done: September 1st, 2017
- Integration testing data will be added to the platform by July 31st, 2017
- Training data available September 2nd, 2017
- System submission due: October 1st, 2017
- Results on test data: October 15th, 2017

## Organizers
Key-Sun Choi (KAIST)
Jin-Dong Kim (Database Center for Life Science, ROIS, JP)
Axel-Cyrille Ngonga Ngomo (University of Paderborn, DE)
Ricardo Usbeck (University of Paderborn, DE)

## Contact Information
For further information about the workshop, please contact at: ricardo . usbeck @ upb . de