Call for Papers

While the amount of Linked Open Data (LOD) increases rapidly, it is still used mostly by Semantic Web experts. There are two main obstacles to making the billions of RDF triples already available accessible for common Web users: (1) the need to learn the query language SPARQL, and (2) the need to know the schemas underlying the datasets. Approaches to ease the acess to the Web of Data include graphical query interfaces, agent-based systems, and natural language interfaces. Amongst them, natural language interfaces are receiving an increasing interest due to its high expressive power and low cost for educational purposes. Recent progresses in speech recognition technologies (e.g., Siri and Google Voice) also demonstrate the usefulness of a natural language interface. The goal of this workshop is to bring together experts on the use of natural-language interfaces (NLI) for accessing the Web of Data. This includes amongst others experts on question answering, graphical query interfaces, lexicon generation, information extraction, and natural-language generation. Consequently, the topics of interest include but are not limited to:

  • Natural language query parsing
  • Natural language dialog systems
  • Term matching and entity disambiguation
  • Indexing 
  • Query template generation
  • Query pattern generation
  • SPARQL query generation
  • Discovery of Linked Data sources
  • Endpoint profiling
  • Dealing with data and schema heterogeneity
  • Answer aggregation
  • Answer rendering
  • Providing justifications of answers and conveying trust
  • Knowledge base design for QA
  • Language resources (data & open source software) for QA
  • Reasoning for QA
  • Natural Language querying of RDF exposed as linked data
  • Natural Language querying of Web Services
  • User feedback and interaction

Submission Instructions


NLIWoD 2014 solicits the submission of original research papers in two types:
  • Full paper submissions (up to 16 pages) must describe substantial and original work.
  • Short paper 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.
All submissions must be in English and in PDF 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 papers are to be submitted via EasyChair at https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=nliwod2014. All submissions will be peer-reviewed by the Program Committee of the workshop. Submissions do not need to be anonymous.