First Call for papers
Special Issue on Question Answering
Information Processing & Management Journal

Guest Editors
Patrick Saint-Dizier, IRIT, France (http://www.irit.fr/~Patrick.Saint-Dizier/)
Marie-Francine Moens, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium
(http://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~sien/)

Important dates
Submissions of articles: April 1, 2009
Notification to authors: June 20, 2009
Final version of accepted papers: September 13, 2009


Question answering regards a sophisticated form of information retrieval
characterized by information needs that are expressed as natural language
statements or questions. In contrast to classical information retrieval where
complete documents are considered relevant to the information need, in question
answering specific pieces of information are returned as an answer. Often,
automated reasoning is needed to identify correct answers.

Question answering has its roots decades ago when natural language interfaces to
data or knowledge bases were researched. Today, such older technologies are
blown in a new life, when we witness the growing power of, for instance,
searching multimedia data (i.e., images, video, text, audio) combined with
natural language expressions, and making inferences over content recognized in
text or in the other media.

In this special issue we would like to compose a collection of state of the art
question answering papers which address the problem from different angles, but
are united by the recent technologies for automatically recognizing content in
the textual sources or the semi-automatic recognition in other media sources,
and by the knowledge representation and reasoning paradigms used. Some more
practical issues such as presentation of answers, scalability issues and
indexing structures for question answering might also be addressed.

We particularly welcome submissions on, but not limited to, the following
topics:

Natural language processing for question analysis:
- Question analysis, semantic role labeling
- How to deal with complex questions

Natural language processing for document analysis:
- Information extraction, semantic role labeling, coreference resolution
and content linking
- Discourse analysis

Multimedia processing for question answering:
- Content recognition in images, video, audio and text
- Recognition and resolution of spatial and temporal relationships
- Applications of multimedia question answering

Knowledge representations and reasoning strategies:
- Formal content representations
- Reasoning and matching strategies
- Constraint processing and relaxation
- Textual inference
- Handling incompleteness and uncertainty
- Probabilistic inference
- Data fusion

Speech interfaces and interactive question answering:
- Improved user models through speech interaction
- Dealing with noisy and uncertain question transcripts
- Interaction design
- Dialogue and question answering

Text and multimedia answer generation:
- Response production: summarization, fusion, co-operativity

Data indexing structures and scalability



Submissions for the special topic issue should be high-quality manuscripts on
the theoretical, empirical and methodological issues surrounding question
answering information retrieval. Submissions should describe original research
and not be under consideration in any other forum.

All submissions should be formatted according to the Information Processing &
Management guidelines
(http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/244/author
instructions) for papers, references, and citations and should be submitted
using the Elsevier Editorial System for Information Processing and Management
(http://www.ees.elsevier.com/ipm/).

To ensure that all manuscripts are correctly identified for inclusion into the
special issue, it is important that authors select Special Issue: Question
Answering when they reach the "Article Type" step in the submission process.
Submitted articles will be reviewed according to the Information Processing &
Management reviewing criteria and appropriateness to the special topic issue.


Contact Patrick Saint-Dizier (stdizier at irit.fr) or Marie-Francine Moens
(sien.moens at cs.kuleuven.be) for further information on the CFP.
The program committee will be composed of experts who served on the program
committees of the past and current KRAQ workshops.



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