OKBQA 2017

Open Knowledge Base and Question Answering Workshop at SIGIR, August 11 2017 | Tokyo, Japan

By Moyan Brenn from Anzio, Italy (Tokyo) [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

The OKBQA 2017 has successfully finished. We would like to thank everyone who attended.

Introduction

The huge and rapidly increasing amount of structured and unstructured data available on the Web makes it both possible and necessary to support users in finding relevant information. The trend moves more and more towards smart knowledge services that are able to find information, aggregate them, draw inferences, and present succinct answers without requiring the user to wade through a large number of documents. The novel avenues made possible by knowledge services are numerous and diverse, including ubiquitous information access (from smartphones, tablets, smart watches, etc.), barrier-free access to data (especially for the blind and disabled) and knowledge discovery.

Over the last years, several challenges and calls for research projects have pointed out the dire need for pushing natural language interfaces. In this context, the importance of Semantic Web data as a premier knowledge source is rapidly increasing. But we are still far from having accurate natural language interfaces that allow handling complex information needs in a user-centric and highly performant manner. The development of such interfaces requires the collaboration of a range of different fields, including natural language processing, information extraction, knowledge base construction and population, reasoning, and question answering.

The main goal of this workshop is to join forces in the collaborative development of open frameworks for knowledge extraction and question answering, to share standards, and to foster the creation of an ecosystem of tools and benchmarks. The workshop will therefore not only comprise short and long paper presentations but also a hands-on session on already existing frameworks, standards, and benchmarking campaigns, as well as a social meet-up.

Invited Speakers

Hideyuki Shibuki, Yokohama National University, Japan
Title: Challenges in QA for University Entrance Exam at NTCIR QA-Lab: From Multiple-Choice to Essay Questions

Panel Discussion

Joint Panel Discussion with KG4IR (in the KG4IR workshop room)

Keynote: Bast / Uni-Freiburg
featuring:

Proceedings

The proceedings of OKBQA 2017.(PDF, 7.1MB)

Program

Camera-ready papers are available from the links in the table.

Friday, August 11, 2017
9:00 Opening
9:00–10:30 Session I
9:00– 9:30 Controlling Expressiveness of Question Interpretation with a Constrained Tree Transducer Induction Pascual Martínez-Gómez and Yusuke Miyao
9:30–10:00 TaxoPhrase: Exploring Knowledge Base via Joint Learning of Taxonomy and Topical Phrases Weijing Huang, Wei Chen, Tengjiao Wang and Shibo Tao
10:00–10:30 Multilingualization of Question Answering Using Universal Dependencies Hiroshi Kanayama and Koichi Takeda
   
10:30–10:50 Coffee Break
   
10:50–12:20 Session II
10:50– 11:30 Invited Talk: Challenges in QA for University Entrance Exam at NTCIR QA-Lab: From Multiple-Choice to Essay Questions Hideyuki Shibuki, Yokohama National University, Japan
11:30–12:00 Wikipedia Based Essay Question Answering System for University Entrance Examination Takaaki Matsumoto, Francesco Ciannella, Fadi Botros, Evan Chan, Cheng-Ta Chung, Keyang Xu, Tian Tian and Teruko Mitamura
12:00–12:20 Demo Introduction (3 presentations. 6 min. each)
   
12:20–14:00 Lunch Break

A lunch during the workshop day at SIGIR 2017 will be provided. The venue will be most probably "Hana" at 4F (Workshops are 42/43F) of Keio Plaza Hotel.
People can come down to 4F and have a quick lunch or wrap some food and go back to 42/43F to continue a session. This will be much faster than going out for a lunch.

   
14:00–15:30 Session III
14:00–14:30 Applying Linked Open Data to Machine Translation for Cross-lingual Question Answering Takaaki Matsumoto and Teruko Mitamura
14:30–15:00 Chronological and Geographical Measures for Evaluation of World History Essay QA in University Entrance Exams Hideyuki Shibuki, Kotaro Sakamoto, Madoka Ishioroshi, Akira Fujita, Yoshinobu Kano, Teruko Mitamura, Tatsunori Mori and Noriko Kando
15:00–15:30 Demonstrations (3 systems)
 
   
15:30–15:50 Coffee Break
   
15:50–17:20 Joint Panel Discussion with KG4IR (in the KG4IR workshop room)
  Keynote: Bast / Uni-Freiburg
Joint Discussion Panel with KG4IR workshop, featuring:
  • Hannah Bast, Universitaet Freiburg, Germany
  • Noriko Kando, National Institute of Informatics, Japan
  • Jaap Kamps, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
  • Edgar Meij, Bloomberg L.P., U.K.
  • Bogdan Arsintescu, LinkedIn, U.S.A
  • David Carmel, Yahoo!, Israel


Paper Submissions

OKBQA 2017 solicits the submission of original research papers in two types:

Please use the ACM proceedings style file http://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template
It has LaTeX files, Microsoft Word templeate file, and a sample PDF file.

Before submitting your paper please ensure you have read the Instructions for Authors and that your paper uses the prescribed style files. To submit your work, please use the submission page at the following Easychair address https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=okbqa2017.

At least one author of each paper is expected to register for the workshop and attend to present the paper.

Demo Submissions

The OKBQA2017 workshop, to be held in Tokyo, 11th August, invites proposals for system demonstrations. Submissions may range from early prototypes to mature production-ready systems. Areas of interest include all topics related to KB construction and QA. Please refer to the workshop page for a full lists topics of interest.

Submission Deadline: 5, July 2017

A proposal may be an extended abstract upto two pages including references, and is expected to include:

Note that a proposal should deliver sufficient details about the system to allow evaluation of its quality, relevance to the workshop, and so on.

Please use the ACM proceedings style file http://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template
It has LaTeX files, Microsoft Word templeate file, and a sample PDF file.

Before submitting your paper please ensure you have read the Instructions for Authors and that your paper uses the prescribed style files. To submit your work, please use the submission page at the following Easychair address https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=okbqa2017.

Accepted submissions will be included in the OKBQA2017 workshop proceedings (as abstracts), and will be presented during the workshop.

Topics

Specific topics include but are not limited to:

Important Dates

Organizers

Programme Committee

Contact Information

For further information about the workshop, please contact at: okbqa @ world . kaist . ac . kr
Sponsor: KAIST School of Computing