Saw this on the Linguist List and thought it might be of interest to folks here.
cheers
Brianna
USER-CONTRIBUTED KNOWLEDGE AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: AN EVOLVING SYNERGY
IJCAI 2009 Workshop
<http://lit.csci.unt.edu/~wikiai09/index.php/Main_Page>
==Overview==
The performance of an Artificial Intelligence system often depends on
the amount of world knowledge available to it. During the last decade,
the AI community has witnessed the emergence of a number of highly
structured knowledge repositories whose collaborative nature has led
to a dramatic increase in the amount of world knowledge that can now
be exploited in AI applications. Arguably, the best-known repository
of user-contributed knowledge is Wikipedia. Since its inception less
than eight years ago, it has become one of the largest and fastest
growing online sources of encyclopedic knowledge. One of the reasons
why Wikipedia is appealing to contributors and users alike is the
richness of its embedded structural information: articles are
hyperlinked to each other and connected to categories from an ever
expanding taxonomy; pervasive language phenomena such as synonymy and
polysemy are addressed through redirection and disambiguation pages;
entities of the same type are described in a consistent format using
infoboxes; related articles are grouped together in series templates.
Many more repositories of user-contributed knowledge exist besides
Wikipedia. Collaborative tagging in Delicious and community-driven
question answering in Yahoo! Answers and Wiki Answers are only a few
examples of knowledge sources that, like Wikipedia, can become a
valuable asset for AI researchers. Furthermore, AI methods have the
potential to improve these resources, as demonstrated recently by
research on personalized tag recommendations, or on matching user
questions with previously answered questions. Consequently, we believe
the time is ripe for a dedicated event focused on the synergy between
repositories of user-contributed knowledge and the research in
Artificial Intelligence.
The workshop is intended to be highly interdisciplinary. We encourage
participation of researchers from different perspectives, including
(but not limited to) machine learning, computational linguistics,
information retrieval, information extraction, question answering,
knowledge representation, and others. We also encourage participation
of researchers from other areas who might benefit from the use of
large bodies of machine-readable knowledge.
== Topics==
Topics covered by this workshop include, but are not limited to:
* Using user-contributed knowledge as a source of training data for AI tasks
* Automatic methods for improving the quality of user contributions
* Routing tasks to people who have the expertise to perform them well
* Integrating Wikipedia with existing ontologies (e.g. WordNet, CYC, ODP)
* Extracting annotated data from user contributions
* Enriching user contributions with new types of structural information
* User-contributed knowledge and the Semantic Web / Web 2.0
* Automatic extraction and use of cross-lingual information
* Computerized use of satellite Wiki projects such as Wiktionary,
Wikibooks or Wikispecies
==Workshop Format==
The workshop is planned as a one-day event (full day), which will
consist of an invited talk, paper and demo presentations, and a
discussion panel.
==Submission Info==
We invite the submission of regular full papers (up to 6 pages), short
papers reporting on late-breaking results (up to 3 pages), and
descriptions of system demonstrations (up to 1 page) using the IJCAI
style. Submissions that have been accepted for publication elsewhere
or are under review for another conference must clearly state so on
the front page of the paper.
Submissions should be properly anonymized to make them suitable for
double-blind review. The papers will be submitted through the
EasyChair site at
http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=wikiai09
== Important Dates==
Deadline for long paper submission: March 6th, 2009
Deadline for short papers and demos: March 27th, 2009
Notification of acceptance: April 17th, 2009
Camera-ready papers due at IJCAI: May 8th, 2009
Workshop date: one day between July 11 and July 13, 2009 (to be defined later)
--
They've just been waiting in a mountain for the right moment:
http://modernthings.org/