Call for Papers: JIST 2018 Special Session on Question Answering and ChatBots

Download the CFP

Introduction

This year, JIST features a special track about "Question Answering and ChatBots", which is an opportunity to bring together researchers and practitioners interested in chatbots and question answering to present their ideas and discuss the most important scientific and technical challenges of these emerging fields which both drive a large share of the current innovative products.

Making sense of data is one of the core tasks within a data-driven world where the amount of data is increasing permanently w.r.t. the number of data items, categories, interlinks or properties in general.

Providing an interactive interface for deciphering the available information is the task of question answering as well as of chatbots. Although both research fields target similar challenges and successful system combine technologies from both fields (e.g., well established dialogue managers and answer ranking) a knowledge transfer between both communities seems to be expandable.

This special track provides a platform for both communities or research dedicated to at least one field, respectively.

Topics of interest

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

• Natural language processing (NLP) for question analysis
• Information extraction, semantic role labeling, coreference resolution and content linking
• Interaction design
• Discourse analysis and dialogue management
• Handling incompleteness and uncertainty
• Recognition and resolution of spatial and temporal relationships
• Probabilistic inference
• Formal content representations
• Reasoning and matching strategies
• Answer visualizations
• (Multimodal) human-computer interaction for question answering and chatbots
• Data collections and resources
• Natural language generation
• Question answering or chatbot applications
• Demos, user studies and system evaluation
• Analysis and evaluation of usability and user experience
• Pragmatics of using or deploying chatbots and question answering systems in real-world scenarios

The special track "Question Answering and ChatBots" at JIST 2018 welcomes the submission of papers on novel scientific research, innovations, ideas and/or experience reports relevant to the topics of this special track. Submissions must be original and must not have been submitted for publication elsewhere. This track has a single-blind review process (author names are visible to reviewers, reviewers stay anonymous by default but we encourage reviewers to sign their reviews). The submitted abstract and the topics are leveraged to find adequate reviewers for submitted papers. Please write an email to the program chairs, if you have any questions.

Important Dates

• Abstract submission: 23:59 (Hawaii Time), 3 10 August, 2018 (Extended)
• Full paper submission: 23:59 (Hawaii Time), 10 17 August, 2018 (Extended)
• Notification of Acceptance: 14 September, 2018
• Camera-ready Deadline: 28 September, 2018
• Conference: 26-28 November, 2018

Submission

The papers submitted to special sessions are handled as regular or short papers, which should not be longer than 16 or 8 pages including references, respectively.

Papers can be submitted electronically via EasyChair . Please select the "Question Answering and ChatBots" when you submit your paper(s).

Program Committee (Confirmed Members)

• Sören Auer, TIB Technische Informationsbibliothek & Leibniz Information Center for Science and Technology, Hannover (Germany)
• Andreas Both, DATEV eG (Germany)
• Dennis Diefenbach, Laboratoire Hubert Curien, University of Lyon, Lyon (France)
• Christoph Lange, Fraunhofer IAIS, Sankt Augustin (Germany)
• Jeff Pan, University of Aberdeen (UK)
• Kuldeep Singh, University of Bonn, Bonn (Germany)
• Maximilian Speicher, University of Michigan School of Information, Ann Arbour (USA)