AAAI 2008 Workshop
WIKIPEDIA AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: AN EVOLVING
SYNERGY
http://lit.csci.unt.edu/~wikiai08

CALL FOR PAPERS

OVERVIEW

Since its inception less than seven years ago, Wikipedia has become one of the largest and fastest growing online sources of encyclopedic knowledge. One of the reasons why Wikipedia is appealing to contributors and users alike is the richness of its embedded structural information: articles are hyperlinked to each other and connected to categories from an ever expanding taxonomy; pervasive language phenomena such as synonymy and polysemy are addressed through redirection and disambiguation pages; entities of the same type are described in a consistent format using infoboxes; related articles are grouped together in series templates.

As a large-scale repository of structured knowledge, Wikipedia has become a valuable resource for a diverse set of Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications. Major conferences in natural language processing and machine learning have recently witnessed a significant number of approaches that use Wikipedia for tasks ranging from text categorization and clustering to word sense disambiguation, information retrieval, information extraction and question answering. On the other hand, Wikipedia can greatly benefit from numerous algorithms and representation models developed during decades of AI research, as illustrated recently in tasks such as estimating the reliability of authors' contributions, automatic linking of articles, or intelligent matching of Wikipedia tasks with potential contributors.

The goal of the workshop is to foster the research and dissemination of ideas on the mutually beneficial interaction between Wikipedia and AI. The workshop is intended to be highly interdisciplinary. We encourage participation of researchers working on Wikipedia from different perspectives, including (but not limited to) machine learning, computational linguistics, information retrieval, information extraction, question answering, knowledge representation, and others. We also encourage participation of researchers from other areas who might benefit from the use of a large body of machine-readable knowledge.

TOPICS

We invite submissions of papers addressing the following or related
topics:
- Using Wikipedia as a source of training data for AI tasks (both
supervised an unsupervised)
- Automatic methods for improving the quality of Wikipedia pages
- Integrating Wikipedia with existing ontologies (e.g. WordNet, CYC, ODP)
- Extracting annotated data from Wikipedia
- Enriching Wikipedia with new types of structural information,
- Wikipedia and the Semantic Web / Web 2.0
- Automatic extraction and use of cross-lingual information from Wikipedia
- Computerized use of satellite projects such as Wiktionary, Wikibooks or
Wikispecies

WORKSHOP FORMAT

The day long workshop will consist of presentations, invited talk, demos showcasing work presented in the research papers, and a panel session.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

We invite submissions of regular full papers (up to 6 pages), short papers reporting on late-breaking results (up to 3 pages), and descriptions of system demonstrations (up to 1 page) using the AAAI style. Submissions that have been accepted for publication elsewhere or are under review for another conference must clearly state so on the front page of the paper.

IMPORTANT DATES

Deadline for long papers submission March 21, 2008
Deadline for short papers and system demos April 7, 2008
Notification of acceptance April 21, 2008
Camera-ready papers due at AAAI May 5, 2008

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

Razvan Bunescu, Ohio University (bunescu@ohio.edu)
Evgeniy Gabrilovich, Yahoo! Research (gabr@yahoo-inc.com)
Rada Mihalcea, University of North Texas (rada@cs.unt.edu)

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

1. Eugene Agichtein, Emory University
2. Einat Amitay, IBM Research, Israel
3. Mikhail Bilenko, Microsoft Research
4. Chris Brew, Ohio State University
5. Timothy Chklovski, Structured Commons
6. Massimiliano Ciaramita, Yahoo! Research Barcelona, Spain
7. Andras Csomai, University of North Texas
8. Silviu Cucerzan, Microsoft Research
9. Ido Dagan, Bar-Ilan University, Israel
10. Ravi Kumar, Yahoo! Research
11. Lillian Lee, Cornell University
12. Elizabeth Liddy, Syracuse University
13. Daniel Marcu, Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California
14. Shaul Markovitch, Technion, Israel
15. Raymond Mooney, University of Texas at Austin
16. Vivi Nastase, EML Research, Germany
17. Marius Pasca, Google
18. Ted Pedersen, University of Minnesota, Duluth
19. Simone Paolo Ponzetto, EML Research, Germany
20. Dragomir Radev, University of Michigan
21. Dan Roth, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
22. Peter Turney, National Research Council, Canada

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

For additional information about the workshop please contact the organizers or visit the workshop website at http://lit.csci.unt.edu/~wikiai08