We invite research paper submissions to the 7th Natural Language Interfaces for the Web of Data (NLIWoD) Workshop @ ESWC 2022.

While the amount of Linked Open Data (LOD) increases rapidly, it is still used mostly by Semantic Web experts. Two main obstacles make the billions of RDF triples already available hard to access for everyday Web users: the need to learn the query language SPARQL and the need to know the schemas underlying the datasets. Approaches to addressing these obstacles include graphical query interfaces, agent-based systems, and natural language interfaces. The 7th NLIWoD workshop targets advances in the creation of natural language interfaces for the Web of Data as this category of interfaces is receiving an increasing interest due to their high expressive power and ease of use. For example, recent progress in speech recognition technologies (e.g., Siri, Alexa, Google Voice) demonstrates the usefulness of natural-language interfaces for accessing large amounts of (partly structured) data. The goal of this workshop is to bring together experts on the use of natural-language interfaces (NLI) for answering questions, especially over the Web of Data.

A part of the 7th NLIWoD workshop will be the Question Answering over Linked Data challenge, better known as QALD. This year, we will focus on Question Answering over Wikidata, which will force QA systems to adapt to a new graph as QALD has been DBpedia-centric so far. We will have a novel sub-task on low-resource language QALD to drive accessibility in these languages forward. In particular, QA systems over multilingual KGs widen the access to the Web of Data to lay users. Thus, QA systems increase the accessibility of the Web in general.

We also introduce a new task on comparative QA, where the goal is to efficiently answer factual multilingual comparative questions using knowledge basesComparative QA has a wide range of use cases, such as academic search engines or e-commerce.

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

  • NEW focus! Combining Deep Learning and Knowledge Graphs for NL interfaces
  • NEW focus! NL interfaces for the whole LOD cloud
  • NEW focus! Industrial NL interfaces
  • NEW focus! Comparative Question Answering over Knowledge Bases
  • Focus! Keyword search on structured data
  • Focus! Dialogue systems
  • Focus! Personal assistants
  • Focus! Chatbots (over Linked Data)
  • Focus! Question answering over Big Knowledge Graphs
  • Self-wiring systems natural language systems
  • Benchmarking natural language interfaces
  • Term matching and entity disambiguation
  • Browsing Linked Data
  • Indexing for question answering
  • SPARQL query pattern generation
  • Schema-agnostic query generation
  • Discovery of Linked Data sources
  • Dealing with data and schema heterogeneity NL interfaces
  • Providing justifications of answers and conveying trust
  • Knowledge base design for question answering
  • Language resources and NLP software for question answering
  • Reasoning for question answering
  • Natural language querying of Web services
  • User feedback and interaction

Submission Instructions

NLIWOD solicits the submission of original research articles in three types:

  • Full articles submissions (up to 16 pages) must describe substantial and original work.

  • Short articles submissions (up to 8 pages) must describe an original work which may present

    • A small, focused contribution, a work in progress, or

    • An interesting application case.

  • Demos, posters and QALD system presentations (5 pages)

All submissions must be in English and in formatted the style of the Springer Publications format for Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS). For details on the LNCS style, see Springer’s Author Instructions. All articles are to be submitted via EasyChair.

Important dates

See https://www.nliwod.org/important-dates

Review and Publication

All submissions will be peer-reviewed by the Program Committee of the workshop, the submissions do not need to be anonymous. The accepted contributions will be published in the proceedings of the workshop. Each accepted paper and each system needs to be presented by one of the authors at the workshop.

We encourage HTML submissions but are currently bound to the ESWC proceedings decision, which is still open and thus demands a PDF of your HTML page as well which needs to be formatted according to LNCS. For useful information about HTML submissions, please see here.

Contact Information

In case of questions, please email nliwod7@easychair.org