[edm-announce] Special Issue on Question Generation: Call for Papers

From: Kristy Elizabeth Boyer <keboyer@xxxxxxxx>
To: edm-announce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Thu, 16 Sep 2010 14:34:19 -0400
     SPECIAL ISSUE on QUESTION GENERATION

            --- Call for Papers ---

           Dialogue & Discourse
          An International Journal

http://www.questiongeneration.org/SpecialIssue/


IMPORTANT DATES

- One-page abstract (intent to submit): December 15, 2010
- Full papers: February 15, 2011


TOPIC

Automatically generating questions is an important task in many
different contexts including dialogue systems, intelligent tutoring
systems, automated assessment and search interfaces. Questions are
used to express informational needs: when we do not know something,
the natural thing to do is to ask about it. As computer systems become
more advanced and are expected to be more adaptive and autonomous,
their informational needs grow, and being equipped with the ability to
ask questions has clear advantages. State-of-the-art spoken dialogue
systems are a good case in point: where would they be without the
ability to ask questions, for example, about the user's goals ("Where
would you like to travel to?") or about their understanding of the
users' utterances ("Did you say 'London'?")?

Of course, the purpose of asking questions is not limited to
satisfying straightforward informational needs. In a classroom, a
teacher may ask a question, not because she doesn't know the answer,
but because she wants to know whether the student knows the answer (or
perhaps she wants to provide the student with a hint that will help
him solve whichever problem he is dealing with). Generating such
questions automatically is a central task for intelligent tutoring
systems. Exam questions are another case in point. In the context of
automated assessment, generating questions automatically from
educational resources is a great challenge, with, potentially,
tremendous impact.

In recent years, a significant body of work has begun accumulating on
Question Generation. In 2010, the third workshop on Question
Generation was held in Pittsburgh (co-located with the Tenth
International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems). This
followed on from Question Generation workshops in Washington, D.C.
(hosted by the National Science Foundation) and Brighton, U.K.
(co-located with the 14th International Conference on Artificial
Intelligence in Education). The 2010 workshop included a track on the
First Question Generation Shared Task and Evaluation Campaign
(QGSTEC), with teams from the US, UK, India, Germany, and Canada
participating. November 2010 also brings the 4th Workshop of
Modelling, Management and Generation of Problems/Questions in
Technology-Enhanced Learning.


SCOPE OF THE SPECIAL ISSUE

Authors in a range of disciplines including, but not limited to,
Discourse Analysis, Dialogue Modelling, Formal Semantics, Intelligent
Tutoring Systems, Natural Language Generation, Natural Language
Understanding, and Psycholinguistics are cordially invited to submit
their work for publication in the Special Issue. The work may report
on the automatic generation of questions from a wide variety of inputs
such as, but not limited to, raw text, numerical data, ontologies, and
dialogue act specifications. The ideal article will describe a
substantial novel body of work on automatic question generation and
will appeal to the Dialogue & Discourse audience. Question generation
is an integral part of dialogue behaviour that brings to the forefront
such issues as when questions are asked, what functions they serve,
and what answers might be expected. Additionally, much of the effort
on automatic generation of questions focuses on generating questions
from text, and consequently relies heavily on automated parsing of
both syntax and discourse structure of the texts. Authors are
encouraged to explain how their work fits into the broader context of
dialogue and discourse research.


GUEST EDITORS

Paul Piwek
Centre for Research in Computing
The Open University, UK
http://mcs.open.ac.uk/pp2464/

Kristy Elizabeth Boyer
Department of Computer Science
North Carolina State University, USA
http://www4.ncsu.edu/~keboyer


REVIEWING COMMITTEE

Gregory Aist (Iowa State University, USA)
Itziar Aldabe (University of the Basque Country, Spain)
Lee Becker (University of Colorado at Boulder, USA)
Delphine Bernhard (LIMSI-CNRS,Orsay, France)
Rafael Calvo (University of Sydney, Australia)
Yllias Chali (University of Lethbridge, Canada)
Vinay K. Chaudhri (SRI International, USA)
Zhi-Hong Chen (National Central University, Taiwan)
Dan Flickinger (Stanford University, USA)
Michael Heilman (Carnegie Mellon University, USA)
James Lester (North Carolina State University, USA)
Mihai Lintean (University of Memphis, USA)
Jack Mostow (Carnegie Mellon University, USA)
Rodney Nielsen (Boulder Language Technologies, USA)
Juan Pino (University of Cambridge, UK)
Rashmi Prasad (University of Pennsylvania, USA)
Vasile Rus (University of Memphis, USA)
Svetlana Stoyanchev (The Open University, UK)
Lucy Vanderwende (Microsoft, USA)
Marilyn Walker (University of California Santa Cruz, USA)


SUBMISSION INFORMATION

Manuscripts should conform to the Dialogue & Discourse requirements
(http://www.dialogue-and-discourse.org/auth_instr.html). One-page
abstracts (intents to submit) must be submitted by email to the guest
editors at MCT-QG2010@xxxxxxxxxx no later than December 15, 2010. Full
manuscripts must be submitted by email no later than February 15,
2011.
[edm-announce] Special Issue on Question Generation: Call for Papers

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