GIScience 2023 - the 1st International Workshop on Geographic question-answering (GeoQA-23)

Website: https://ai.di.uoa.gr/#GIScience2023-workshop 

The workshop on geographic question answering (GeoQA) will be held in conjunction with the International Conference on Geographic Information Science (GIScience) in Leeds, United Kingdom, for half a day (13:30 -17:00) on September 12, 2023. We welcome submissions of vision/position papers on geographic question-answering as well GeoQA tools and datasets to be presented at the workshop.

Driven by the need to answer geographic questions in people’s daily life and the potential of searching for geo-analytical resources for scientists, GeoQA has recently become an area of intensive research. A lot of progress has been made in GeoQA subfields, such as geographic corpora and knowledge graph construction, spatial concept recognition and annotation, question parsing and translation, spatial query extension, as well as spatial knowledge encoding and resource composition. Meanwhile, there are many challenges that remain unsolved, such as extending large GeoQA datasets for machine learning, generalizing language models to different question types, integrating spatial knowledge and resources, and improving the retrieval performance of geoQA systems. Therefore, in this workshop, we aim to bring together researchers from diverse disciplines to compare early GeoQA systems, discuss state-of-the-art geoQA research, and discover challenges and future directions.

Submission Guidelines

We welcome submissions of the following forms:

• One-pager on GeoQA datasets (e.g., corpora, question-answer pairs) or GeoQA tools. Datasets and tools will be demonstrated and tested in a hands-on session.
• Position or vision paper: no longer than 2 pages (including references). Papers will be presented in a lightning talk session and each has 5 minutes.

Papers should use the GIScience template and be submitted in pdf format via the easychair platform. Submissions will not undergo peer review but will be evaluated based on the interest for the workshop.

List of Topics

The workshop will cover a wide range of topics related to geoQA, including but not limited to:

• GeoQA tasks and spatial question types
• Conceptual foundations of GeoQA
• GeoQA question corpora and answer datasets
• GeoQA metrics and validation approaches
• Knowledge systems and ontologies for GeoQA
• Document datasets and retrieval systems for GeoQA
• Machine learning for GeoQA
• Phrase analysis, grammars and NLP for GeoQA
• Entity disambiguation and georeferencing for GeoQA
• Reasoners and algorithms for GeoQA
• What makes GeoQA special, as compared to QA?
• Comparison of GeoQA approaches and systems

Committees

Program Committee

• TBD

Organizing Committee

• Haiqi Xu, Department of Human Geography and Planning, Utrecht University, The Netherlands
• Ehsan Hamzei, Infrastructure Engineering, University of Melbourne, Australia
• Manolis Koubarakis, Department of Informatics and Telecommunications, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece
• Martin Tomko, Infrastructure Engineering, University of Melbourne, Australia
• Gengchen Mai, Department of Geography, University of Georgia, United States of America
• Simon Scheider, Department of Human Geography and Planning, Utrecht University, The Netherlands

Venue

The conference will be held in Leeds, UK, on Tuesday 12th September 2023 collocated with GIScience 2023.

Contact

All questions about submissions should be emailed to Haiqi Xu (h.xu1@uu.nl).