What's New

Program is available: March 13
Accepted paper list is available : February 22, 2008
The accepted papers will be included in the CD proceedings of the main conference : January 5, 2008
The deadline of final version submission was changed from March 1 to February 27 due to the schedule for CD proceedings. : December 10, 2007
This site was open. : November 19, 2007
Call For Papers : November 19, 2007

Workshop Abstract

The amount of information available on the Web has increased rapidly, reaching levels that few would ever have imagined possible. We live in what could be called the "information-explosion era," and this situation poses new problems for computer scientists. Users demand useful and reliable information from the Web in the shortest time possible, but the obstacles to fulfilling this demand are many including language barriers and the so-called "long tail." Even worse, users may provide only vague specifications of the information that they actually want, so that a more concrete specification must somehow be inferred by Web access tools.
Natural language processing (NLP) is one of the key technologies for solving the above Web usability problems. Almost all information on the Web is provided in the form of natural language texts, and so in order to offer solutions to these problems we must perform searching and extracting information from the Web texts using NLP technologies. The aim of this workshop is to bring researchers and practitioners together in order to discuss our most pressing needs with respect to accessing information on the Web, and to discuss new ideas in NLP technologies that might offer viable solutions for those issues.

Note that this is a half-day workshop scheduled in the afternoon on April 22, 2008. Participants registered for NLPIX2008 will also be allowed to attend sessions of the other half-day workshop "QAWeb2008" (morning on April 22) since the two will be treated as one workshop under the title "Workshops on Language-centric Web Applications" in the registration form.

Theme and Topics

As users' demands for the Web diversify, it is often the case that existing commercial search engines cannot provide useful information. This workshop focuses on diversified users' needs that have not been sufficiently satisfied by the existing search engines and other technologies, and discusses new ideas in NLP techniques that might offer viable solutions.
Therefore, we welcome submissions of original papers describing a wide range of applications of the NLP technologies to Web access. Possible topics of the submissions include, but are not limited to:

Cross-lingual and cross-cultural Web access using machine translation
Information extraction/fact retrieval from the Web
Disambiguation of entities/facts on the Web
Dialogue/Interactive/Exploratory systems for Web access using natural languages
Automatic summarization of Web documents
Combination/Discrimination of multiple document resources on the Web
Trust/credibility evaluation of Web documents using NLP
Opinion extraction/Sentiment analysis on the Web
Long tail/minority/serendipity search using NLP
Entity identification on the Web e.g. people name search
Knowledge Acquisition from the Web documents/query logs for effective Web access
Effective search methods for mobile devices using NLP
NLP-based blog analysis
Other advanced NLP-based Web access technologies

In particular, we solicit the papers that aim at fulfilling a NOVEL type of needs in Web access and that can provide a new insight into future directions of Web access research.