Coling 2008 Workshop:
IR4QA: Information Retrieval for Question Answering

Manchester, 24 August, 2008

In connection with Coling 2008, the 22nd International Conference on Computational Linguistics
May 18-22

Open domain question answering (QA) has become a very active research area over the past decade, due in large measure to the stimulus of the TREC Question Answering track. This track addresses the task of finding answers to natural language (NL) questions (e.g. "How tall is the Eiffel Tower?" "Who is Aaron Copland?" "What effect does second-hand smoke have on non-smokers?") from large text collections. This task stands in contrast to the more conventional IR task of retrieving documents relevant to a query, where the query may be simply a collection of keywords (e.g. "Eiffel Tower", "American composer, born Brooklyn NY 1900, ...").

After a competitive reviewing process 10 papers have been accepted for presentation at IR4QA 2008. The workshop will be organised as follows:

9:15–9:30Welcome
9:30–10:00Improving Text Retrieval Precision and Answer Accuracy in Question Answering Systems
Matthew Bilotti and Eric Nyberg
10:00–10:30Exact Phrases in Information Retrieval for Question Answering
Svetlana Stoyanchev, Young Chol Song and William Lahti
10:30–11:00Coffee Break
11:00–11:30Simple is Best: Experiments with Different Document Segmentation Strategies for Passage Retrieval
Jörg Tiedemann and Jori Mur
11:30–12:00Passage Retrieval for Question Answering using Sliding Windows
Mahboob Khalid and Suzan Verberne
12:00–12:30A Data Driven Approach to Query Expansion in Question Answering
Leon Derczynski, Jun Wang, Robert Gaizauskas and Mark A. Greenwood
12:30–2:00Lunch
2:00–2:30Answer Validation by Information Distance Calculation
Fangtao Li, Xian Zhang and Xiaoyan Zhu
2:30–3:00Using Lexico-Semantic Information for Query Expansion in Passage Retrieval for Question Answering
Lonneke van der Plas and Jörg Tiedemann
3:00–3:30Evaluation of Automatically Reformulated Questions in Question Series
Richard Shaw, Ben Solway, Robert Gaizauskas and Mark A. Greenwood
3:30–4:00Coffee Break
4:00–4:30Topic Indexing and Retrieval for Factoid QA
Kisuh Ahn and Bonnie Webber
4:30–5:00Indexing on Semantic Roles for Question Answering
Luiz Augusto Pizzato and Diego Mollá
5:00–5:30Discussion Session

Previous Workshops