The 2002 Spring Symposium SeriesStanford UniversitySponsored by the American Association for Artificial Intelligence |
The rate of producing textual documents is quite larger than the rate
of generating reliable knowledge bases and reasoning
mechanisms. However, the information expressed in various on-line
textual documents, either on the Internet or in large text
repositories cannot be computationally used unless it is associated
with expert knowledge bases. The incorporation of textual information
into knowledge bases is not simple, due to the multiple forms of
ambiguities that characterize natural language texts. However, today
we are in the position of having sufficiently large knowledge bases
available and the natural language processing technologies have
matured enough to process real-world documents and extract information
and answer natural language questions with good accuracy.
Part of the recent success of open-domain Q/A is due to novel combinations of technology developed in the 90s (e.g. named entity recognizers) with techniques used in the 80s (e.g. abductive interpretations of texts) and novel indexing/retrieval mechanisms (e.g passage retrieval). Discovering relevant knowledge from the web can be combined with domain knowledge provided by large-scale knowledge bases (e.g. Cyc, Wordnet, UT's Component Library, IEEE's Standard Upper Ontology effort). Furthermore, textual information extraction techniques can be enhanced by using world knowledge available in large lexicon-semantic knowledge bases. Achieving orders of magnitude improvement in question answering performance requires us to make synergistic use of these advances. Extraction and text mining methods must make use of knowledge based inference in support of the extraction task and for post processing the extracted information. Knowledge bases need to rely on large corpuses of knowledge to support their initial creation, and then subsequent testing and maintenance. The symposium will bring together diverse techniques for text and answer mining from AI (more specifically, natural language processing, machine learning, knowledge representation and reasoning) with information retrieval (from text collections or from the web) or data tracking and detection. The invited talks and contributed papers will focus on topics such as common sense knowledge bases, linguistic knowledge bases, use of dialog in query formulation, inference and query evaluation techniques, and techniques for competence evaluation of question answering systems. Organizing Committee Sanda Harabagiu (cochair), University of Texas at Dallas (sanda@cs.utdallas.edu); Vinay Chaudhri (cochair), SRI International (chaudhri@ai.sri.com); Bruce Porter, University of Texas Austin; Ray Mooney, University of Texas Austin; Tom Mitchell(tentative) Carnegie-Mellon University; Claire Cardie, Cornell University; Richard Fikes, Stanford University; Dan Moldovan, University of Texas at Dallas; Srinivas Narayanan, SRI International; Donna Harman, NIST. |
Monday March 25th 2002 | |||
9:00--9:30 | Opening Remarcks | Sanda Harabagiu | |
9:30--10:30 | Advanced Question Answering - Plenty of challenges to go around See presentation slides. | John Prange | |
10:30--11:00 | Break | ||
11:00--11:30 | Abductive Processes for Answer Justification | Sanda Harabagiu and Steve Maiorano | |
11:30--12:00 | Mining Answers for Causation Questions | Roxana Girju and Dan Moldovan | |
12:00--12:30 | Processing Definition Questions in an Open-Domain Question Answering System | Marius Pasca | |
12:30--14:00 | Lunch Break | ||
14:00--14:30 | Text Mining with Information Extraction | Un Yong Nahm and Ray Mooney | |
14:30--15:00 | Point and Paste Question Answering | Sanda Harabagiu, Finley Lacatusu and Paul Morarescu | |
15:00--15:30 | An Evolutionary Genre-Based and Domain Independent Approach to High Level Knowledge Discovery in Texts | John Atkinson, Stuart Aiken and Chris Mellish | |
15:30--16:00 | Break | ||
16:00--16:30 | Gleaning Answers from the Web | Nick Kushmerick | |
16:30--17:00 | The Use of Question Types to Match Questions in FAQ Finder | Steve Lytien and Noriko Tomuro | |
17:00--17:30 | Automatically Identifying Candidate Treatments from Existing Medical Literature | Catherine Blake and Wanda Pratt | |
17:30--18:00 | Break | ||
18:00--19:00 | Reception | ||
Tuesday March 26th 2002 | |||
9:00--10:00 | Panel on Large Knowledge Bases | Adam Pease, Tony Cohn, Pat Hayes, Ken Murray and Chris Welty | |
10:00--10:30 | Automatic Deduction for Spatial Reasoning | Tomas Uribe | |
10:30--11:00 | Break | ||
11:00--12:00 | Finding Similar Content in Different Documents | John Everette | |
12:00--12:30 | Analogical Reasoning on Large Knowledge Bases | Shawn Nicholson | |
12:30--14:00 | Lunch Break | ||
14:00--15:00 | Peer Data Management Systems: Planning for the Semantic Web | Alon Halevy | |
15:00--15:30 | Mining Answers from Texts and KBs: Our Position | Bruce Porter, Ken Barker, James Fan, Paul Navratil, Dan Tecuci and Peter Yeh | |
15:30--16:00 | Break | ||
16:00--17:00 | Explaining Knowledge Bases for Query Answering on Semantic Web | Deborah McGuiness | |
17:00--17:30 | Searching for Narative Structures | Henrik Scharfe | |
17:30--18:00 | Break | ||
18:00--19:00 | Plenary Session with other Symposia | ||
Wednesday March 27th 2002 | |||
9:00--10:00 | CYKCORP's View of Question Answering | Michael Witbrock | |
10:00--10:30 | AskMSR: Queston Answering Using the Worldwide Web | Michele Banko, Eric Brill, Susan Dumais and Jimmy Lin | |
10:30--11:00 | Break | ||
11:00--11:30 | Qanda and the Catalyst Architecture | Scott Mardis and John Burger | |
11:30--12:00 | Closing Remarcks | Vinay Chaudhri |