Workshop on
Multilingual Question Answering - MLQA'06

April 4, 2006, Trento, Italy

The EACL 2006 Workshop on Multilingual Question Answering will be hosted in conjunction with the 11th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics which will take place April 3-7, 2006, in Trento, Italy.


BACKGROUND

Despite the great deal of attention that Question Answering (QA) has received in recent years due to the landmark Q&A Track at the Text REtrieval Conference (TREC), multilinguality has been outside the mainstream of QA research, which has focused mainly on the English language. Multilingual QA has emerged only in the last few years as a complementary research task, representing a promising direction for at least two reasons. First, it allows users to interact with machines in their native languages, contributing to easier, faster, and more equal information access. Second, cross-lingual capabilities enable QA systems to access information stored only in language-specific text collections.

The success of the QA track in recent evaluation campaigns at CLEF (Cross-Language Evaluation Forum) and NTCIR (Evaluation of Information Access Technologies) has shown increasing interest in both monolingual non-English QA (questions and answers in the same language) and in cross-lingual QA, where the question is posed in a source language and the answer must be found in a target collection of a different language.

The workshop intends to address a number of challenging issues for research in multilingual QA, including searching in multilingual document collections, collecting and merging answers found in documents from different languages, using heterogeneous multilingual data collections (such as the Web, XML data or data in relational databases) for answer generation, and interpreting questions in different languages. Additionally papers related to user studies or case studies where multilingual QA has played a major role are most welcome.


TOPICS

Relevant topics for the workshop include but are not restricted to:

  • Monolingual QA systems for languages other than English;
  • Cross-lingual QA systems;
  • Multilingual Web-based QA;
  • Case studies and user studies of Multilingual QA;
  • Specific Translation techniques for Cross-lingual QA;
  • The influence of translation on Cross-lingual QA;
  • Multilingual QA in restricted vs. open domains;
  • QA from heterogeneous multilingual data collections such as unstructured text, semi-structured data and structured data;
  • Techniques for porting QA systems among languages;
  • The effectiveness of particular techniques in different languages;
  • Comparisons between QA in different languages including European and Asian languages;
  • Evaluation of Multilingual QA systems;
  • Resources for Multilingual QA.


SUBMISSIONS

Please submit your paper in the form of a PDF file no later than January 6, 2006 by going to the following URL and following the instructions there:


Each submission will be reviewed by at least two members of the programme committee. Accepted papers will be published in the workshop proceedings.

Dual submissions to the main EACL 2006 conference and this workshop are allowed; if you submit to the main session, do indicate this when you submit to the workshop. If your paper is accepted for the main session, you should withdraw your paper from the workshop upon notification by the main session.



REGISTRATION

Information on registration and registration fees will be provided at the main conference web page: http://eacl06.itc.it/registration.htm



IMPORTANT DATES

January 6, 2006 - Deadline for workshop papers
January 27, 2006 - Notification of acceptance
February 10, 2006 - Camera-ready papers due
April 4, 2006 - Workshop

As the schedule is extremely tight, deadline extensions are NOT possible.



PROGRAMME COMMITTEE

Anselmo Peñas (UNED, Madrid, Spain) co-chair
Richard Sutcliffe (University of Essex¹, England) co-chair
Lili Aunimo (University of Helsinki, Finland)
Christelle Ayache (ELDA/ELRA, Paris, France)
Johan Bos (University of Rome "La Sapienza", Italy)
Gosse Bouma (University of Groningen, The Netherlands)
Hsin-Hsi Chen (National Taiwan University, Taiwan)
Danilo Giampiccolo (CELCT, Trento, Italy)
Brigitte Grau (LIMSI-CNRS, France)
Donna Harman (NIST, USA)
Michael Hess (University of Zürich, Switzerland)
Valentin Jijkoun (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
Noriko Kando (NII, Tokyo, Japan)
Dominique Laurent (Synapse Développement, Toulouse, France)
Bernardo Magnini (ITC-irst, Trento, Italy)
André Martins (Priberam Informática, Lisbon, Portugal)
Diego Mollá (Macquarie University, Australia)
Günter Neumann (DFKI, Saarbrücken, Germany)
Carol Peters (CNR-ISTI, Pisa, Italy)
Diana Santos (Linguateca, Oslo, Norway)
Yutaka Sasaki (ATR, Kyoto, Japan)
Kiril Simov (Bulgarian Academy of Science, Sofia, Bulgaria)
Bill Teahan (University of Wales, Bangor, Wales)
José Luis Vicedo (University of Alicante, Spain)


(¹) On Sabbatical from University of Limerick




This Workshop has the partial support of:

UNED - Natural Language Processing Group
CELCT
CELCT
CLEF Cross-Language Evaluation Forum
ELENET
R2D2 PROJECT
Question Answering in Digital Documents

TIC2003-07158-C04 financed by the Science & Technology Department of Spain 2003-2006