TCBR Call For Papers - "Textual Case-Based Reasoning: Beyond Retrieval"

[Paulo Gomes]

[ Please circulate / Apologies for multiple postings ]

             
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                         CALL FOR PAPERS
           
          Fourth Workshop on Textual Case-Based Reasoning

          "Textual Case-Based Reasoning: Beyond Retrieval"

                      http://tcbr.dei.uc.pt

                         Workshop at the 
     Seventh International Conference on Case-Based Reasoning
                         15 August 2007
                    Belfast - Northern Ireland
                   http://www.iccbr.org/iccbr07/
            
	       Paper Submission Deadline: 30 April 2007
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The aim of this workshop is to provide a forum for the discussion 
of trends, research issues and practical experiences in Textual 
Case-Based Reasoning (TCBR). TCBR applies the Case-Based Reasoning
(CBR) problem-solving methodology to situations where experiences 
are predominantly captured in text form. The theme of the workshop
is 'Textual Case-Based Reasoning: Beyond Retrieval'.

We invite submissions of two types:
- Research and application papers; and
- Papers that address the workshop challenge.

Submission topics for research and application papers
-----------------------------------------------------

We particularly welcome contributions that explore approaches that
address the workshop theme. Topics include, but are not limited 
to, the following: 

- Textual case authoring (e.g. from the Web, from semi-structured 
  documents). 
- Adaptation of textual cases. 
- Explanation in TCBR.
- Maintenance of textual case bases. 
- The relationship between textual CBR and related technologies, 
  such as text mining, question-answering, dialogue systems, 
  and human-language technology. 
- Approaches to multilingual TCBR, mixed content types (e.g. text
  and images) and collective TCBR.
- Automated extraction of textual knowledge sources (e.g. cases, 
  similarity measures, thesauruses, lexicons, taxonomies,
  ontologies & folksonomies). 
- Testing, evaluation, analysis and visualisation methods for 
  TCBR. 
- Conversational TCBR. 
- TCBR case studies.

Papers that address the workshop challenge
------------------------------------------

We encourage all potential workshop participants, individually
or as a research group, to submit a short paper that addresses
the workshop challenge (described below). Submission of a
research or application paper (above) does not preclude
submission of a workshop challenge paper. Accepted challenge
papers will appear in the workshop proceedings, along with 
research and application papers. Short presentations of the
accepted challenge papers at the workshop will form the basis
for workshop discussions.

The challenge that we propose consists in analysing the corpus
of Air Investigation Reports available from the Transportation 
Safety Board of Canada. The reports are ordered by year and are
available in English and French at:
   http://www.tsb.gc.ca/en/reports/
   http://www.tsb.gc.ca/fr/reports/
Investigation reports are created by human experts to describe 
system malfunctions or procedural errors, in this case in 
Canadian air traffic. They are written in natural language, but 
may also contain images referenced from the text. They mostly 
share a common structure; most frequently, they are divided into
sections such as Summary, Analysis, Safety Actions, and so on.

Imagine that you are to use this corpus to build a TCBR system
that supports human investigators. A TCBR system might support 
the investigators in tasks such as the following:
- authoring a new investigation report;
- proposing safety actions in response to a new incident;
- discovering recurring unsolved problems.
A non-exhaustive list of the difficulties to be overcome in 
building such a TCBR system includes:
- the free-form vocabulary, the length of the documents, and
  the likelihood that section headers may not accurately 
  describe section content;
- multilingual support (English and French), and multimedia
  support (text and images);
- possible obsolescence of cases due to, e.g., changes in
  aircraft manufacture, in airport infrastructure, or in
  policies and legal requirements.

You might like to submit, for example, a 2 or 3 page paper that
describes some of the problems in more detail; or a 3 or 4
page paper that proposes ways of overcoming some of these 
problems; or a 4 or 5 page paper that reports actual experience
in addressing the problems (perhaps using the jColibri
framework). We particularly welcome contributions that address
the workshop theme ('Beyond Retrieval').

Format and submission 
---------------------

Papers of both types should be submitted in Springer LNCS format, 
which is the format required for the final camera ready copy, 
subject to the following page limits:
- a maximum of 10 pages for research and application papers; and
- a maximum of 5 pages for papers that address the workshop 
  challenge.
Authors' instructions along with LaTeX and Word macro files are
available on the web at 
   http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html 

Accepted papers will appear in the Workshop Proceedings. We also 
plan to edit a special issue of a journal with extended versions
of a selection of the accepted contributions.  

Instructions for submission can be found on the workshop web site.

Important dates 
---------------

April  30, 2007: Deadline for workshop paper submissions
May    28, 2007: Notification of acceptance for workshop papers
June   25, 2007: Deadline for workshop final camera-ready copies
August 15, 2007: TCBR Workshop, Belfast, Northern Ireland

Organising committee 
--------------------

Derek Bridge, University College Cork, Ireland
Paulo Gomes,  University of Coimbra,   Portugal
Nuno Seco,    University of Coimbra,   Portugal