http://webqa2016.tumblr.com/

[Preslav Nakov]

FYI, there is a workshop that is relevant to CQA at SIGIR.

Submissions are welcome until May 26, 2016:

http://webqa2016.tumblr.com/

Workshop on Web Question Answering Beyond Factoids (WebQA 2016)

Organizers
Eugene Agichtein, Emory University, USA
Charlie Clarke, University of Waterloo, Canada
Lluís Màrquez , Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU, Qatar
Alessandro Moschitti, Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU, Qatar
Preslav Nakov, Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU, Qatar
Idan Szpektor, Yahoo Labs, Israel

Web search engines have made great progress at answering factoid queries. However, they are not well-tailored for managing more complex questions, especially when they require explanation and/or description. WebQA workshop aims at exploring diverse approaches to answering questions on the Web. This year, particular emphasis will be given to Community Question Answering (CQA), where comments by the users engaged in the community can be used to answer new questions. Questions posted on the Web can be short and ambiguous (similarly to Web queries to a search engine). These issues make the WebQA task more challenging than traditional QA, and finding the most effective approaches for it remains an open problem.Unlike the more formal conference format, the aim of this workshop is to bring together researchers in diverse areas working on this problem, including those from NLP, IR, social media and recommender systems communities. This workshop is specifically designed for the SIGIR audience. However, due to its format, its goal, as compared to the main conference, is to conduct a more focused and open discussion, encouraging the presentation of work in progress and late-­breaking initial results in Web Question Answering. Both academic and industrial participation will be solicited, including keynotes and invited speakers.