Call for Papers / Call for Articles

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 common 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. This 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 the ease of use. For example, recent progresses in speech recognition technologies (e.g., Siri, Google Voice) demonstrate 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.

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

  • NEW focus! Dialogue systems

  • NEW focus! Personal assistants

  • NEW focus! Chatbots (over Linked Data)

    • Question answering over Linked Data

    • Deep Learning for Natural Language Interaction

    • 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

    • Endpoint profiling

    • Dealing with data and schema heterogeneity

    • 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 RDF exposed as Linked Data

    • Natural language querying of Web services

    • User feedback and interaction

Submission Instructions

NLIWoD solicits the submission of original research articles in two 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 and posters presentations (up to 4 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.

We encourage HTML submissions but are currently bound to the ISWC 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 https://2018.eswc-conferences.org/call-for-papers/ .