Question Answering over Curated and Open Web Sources

The last few years have seen an explosion of research on the topic of automated question answering (QA), spanning the communities of information retrieval, natural language processing, and artificial intelligence. This tutorial would cover the highlights of this really active period of growth for QA to give the audience a grasp over the families of algorithms that are currently being used. We partition research contributions by the underlying source from where answers are retrieved: curated knowledge graphs, unstructured text, or hybrid corpora. We choose this dimension of partitioning as it is the most discriminative when it comes to algorithm design. Other key dimensions are covered within each sub-topic: like the complexity of questions addressed, and degrees of explainability and interactivity introduced in the systems. We would conclude the tutorial with the most promising emerging trends in the expanse of QA, that would help new entrants into this field make the best decisions to take the community forward. Much has changed in the community since the last tutorial on QA in SIGIR 2016, and we believe that this timely overview will indeed benefit a large number of conference participants

Report on the future conversations workshop at CHIIR 2021

The Future Conversations workshop at CHIIR’21 looked to the future of search, recommen- dation, and information interaction to ask: where are the opportunities for conversational interactions? What do we need to do to get there? Furthermore, who stands to benefit?The workshop was hands-on and interactive. Rather than a series of technical talks, we solicited position statements on opportunities, problems, and solutions in conversational search in all modalities (written, spoken, or multimodal). This paper –co-authored by the organisers and participants of the workshop– summarises the submitted statements and the discussions we had during the two sessions of the workshop. Statements discussed during the workshop are available at https://bit.ly/FutureConversations2021Statements