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CLEF 2010 Workshop on Multiple Language Question Answering (MLQA'10)

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Call for Papers




The workshop will take place on Wednesday 22nd September 2010, in conjunction with CLEF 2010 - Conference on Multilingual and Multimodal Information Access Evaluation, Padua, Italy


http://nlp.uned.es/MLQA10/



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Overview



Quite a long period of research on Question Answering (QA) has been driven by the annual tracks at CLEF, TREC and NTCIR. Since the QA at CLEF track was started in 2003, numerous groups have participated over the years and experiments have been conducted in many different language pairs. The result is that there are now several QA research groups in almost all the European countries and they have sufficient expertise to create systems which can perform complex tasks.



However, there is a continuous need of redefining the research field, and determine with some advance what are the next steps in QA systems development, research and evaluation.



Following the success of ResPubliQA 2009, the second evaluation campaign of QA systems over European Legislation has been held within the framework of CLEF 2010 conference. The aims of the approach were:



· to move towards a domain of potential users;

· to propose a setting which allows the direct comparison of performance across languages;

· to allow QA technologies to be evaluated against IR approaches.



A key element is to enable QA and IR systems to be directly compared in the same task. This is why both passages and exact answers were allowed to be returned this year.





Submissions

The workshop intends to address challenging issues for research in Multilingual Question Answering. Two types of written contributions are invited:



1) Each participant in the ResPubliQA 2010 evaluation campaign is requested to submit a paper (8-10 pages) describing the system, how the runs were produced, and summarizing the main details and results of their experiments.



2) Additionally, the submission of position papers (2-4 pages) is most welcome. A position paper presents an arguable opinion about an issue. The goal of a position paper is to convince the audience that your opinion is valid and worth listening to, without the need to present a completed research work and/or validated results. A position paper may be a short report and discussion of ideas focused on the topic “next steps in QA research, system development and evaluation”.





Submissions will be reviewed by members of the programme committee and judged on technical quality, clarity and relevance to the workshop.
A number of accepted papers will be selected for oral or poster presentations.



Papers should be set in accordance with Spinger guidelines using the LaTeX or Word templates which are available at:

http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-6-793341-0



Papers should be submitted in pdf form via the CLEF 2010 LABs EasyChair system: http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=clef2010labs





All the final accepted reports will be published in on-line Proceedings with regular ISBN number and will be posted on the CLEF 2010 website (http://www.clef2010.org/) short before the workshop in Padua. Extended abstract will be printed and the Book of Abstracts will be distributed at the MLQA'10 workshop to all attendees. The papers will also be indexed by DBLP. Possible publication of post-proceedings volume will be considered.





Important Dates



• Submission of Papers: July 15

• Notification of acceptance: July 30

• Camera ready papers: August 15

• Workshop: 22 September 2010, Padua, Italy





MLQA'10 Organizers



- Anselmo Peñas, UNED, Madrid, Spain

- Pamela Forner, CELCT, Trento, Italy

- Richard Sutcliffe, University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland

- Alvaro Rodrigo, UNED, Madrid, Spain





MLQA'10 Programme Committee (Provisional)



- Alexander Gelbukh, CIC-IPN, Mexico

- Bernardo Magnini, FBK-irst, Italy

- Corina Forascu, UAIC and Racai, Romania

- Dan Tufis, RACAI, Romania

- Diego Molla, Macquarie University, Australia

- Erik Tjong Kim Sang, University of Groningen, The Netherlands

- Fabio Massimo Zanzotto, University of Rome "Tor Vergata", Italy

- Guenter Neumann, DFKI, Germany

- Horacio Rodriguez, Polytechnic University of Catalonia, Spain

- Ingo Glöckner, University of Hagen, Germany

- Johannes Leveling, Dublin City University, Ireland

- Jordi Turmo, Polytechnic University of Catalonia, Spain

- Jose Luis Vicedo, University of Alicante, Spain

- Luis Fernando Costa, SINTEF ICT, Portugal

- Paolo Rosso, Polytechnic University Valencia, Spain

- Ray Larson, University of California, USA

- Sven Hartrumpf, FernUniversity of Hagen