Proceedings

Proceedings are now availabe at https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3196/

Goal

The NLIWoD workshop focuses on the advancement of Natural Language (NL) Interfaces to the Web of Data. This yearly highlight for the active NL interface community centered around semantic technologies aims to facilitate discussions on the development of question answering systems, chatbots, and other NL techniques.

The workshop targets academics and practitioners with a focus on information access for structured data. We expect an audience including experts in Human-Computer Interaction, Natural Language Processing, Information Retrieval, Question Answering, Dialogue Systems, Software Design, Semantic Web/Linked Data and Knowledge Graphs. We hope to promote active collaboration and discussion within a diverse audience.

Background

The importance of how typical Web users can access the body of knowledge on the Web, grows with the amount of structured data published thereon. Over the past years, there has been an increasing amount of research on interaction paradigms that allow end users to profit from the expressive power of Semantic Web standards while at the same time hiding their complexity behind an intuitive and easy-to-use interface. Especially natural language interfaces have received wide attention, as they allow users to express arbitrarily complex information needs in an intuitive fashion and, at least in principle, in their own language. Multilingualism has, in fact, become an issue of major interest for the Semantic Web community, as both the number of actors creating and publishing data all in languages other than English, as well as the amount of users that access this data and speak native languages other than English has been and still is growing substantially.

The key challenge is to translate the users’ information needs into a form such that they can be evaluated using standard Semantic Web query processing and inference techniques. Over the past years, a range of approaches has been developed to address this challenge, showing significant advances towards answering natural language questions with respect to large, heterogeneous sets of structured data. Many systems are deployed in industry and academia but their inner workings, as well as advantages and disadvantages, are not well known. The topics of this workshop and challenge are thus of great importance and interest to the Semantic Web community.

By attending a classical workshop combined with a challenge composed of several sub-tasks, participants will experience a versatile range of academic approaches and applications through the multi-faceted workshop format. We aim to bridge the gap between academia and industry to attract junior as well as senior researchers from both worlds leading to a memorable experience.

Supported by

image The authors acknowledge the financial support by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy of Germany in the project CoyPu (project number 01MK21007[G]). CoyPu

image https://www.nfdi4datascience.de/

Unified Timeline:

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

Slides and Award:

Here is the slide which includes system evaluation scores and paper award on NLIWoD workshop during ESWC2022: