AKBC 2019
1st Conference on Automated Knowledge Base Construction (AKBC)
May 20-22, 2019, Monday-Wednesday, Amherst, MA
www: http://www.akbc.ws ; email: info [at] akbc.ws
Key dates
April 5, 2019, Friday: Early Registration Deadline
April 21, 2019: Hotel rooms no longer held
May 20-21, 2019, Monday-Tuesday: Conference, UMass Amherst
May 22, 2019, Wednesday: Workshops, UMass Amherst
Knowledge Base Construction
Knowledge gathering, representation, and reasoning are among the fundamental challenges of artificial intelligence. Large-scale repositories of knowledge about entities, relations, and their abstractions are known as “knowledge bases”. Most major technology companies now have substantial efforts in knowledge base construction, and related scholarly work spans many research areas, including machine learning, natural language processing, computer vision, information integration, databases, search, data mining, knowledge representation, human computation, human-computer interfaces, and fairness. The AKBC conference serves as a research forum for all these areas, in both academia and industry.
New Conference
Nearly ten years after the first AKBC workshop in Grenoble, France, AKBC is becoming a conference. Why a new stand-alone conference?
Long-standing and growing interest in the area, now with too much material for a one-day workshop. We have sufficient material for a two-day conference plus topical workshops.
We want to grow and connect the community beyond existing individual conference communities, bringing together ML, NLP, DB, IR, KRR, semantics, reasoning, common sense, QA, human computation, dialog, HCI.
We want to set our own culture, including reviewing practices, and meeting format. We have fond memories of the first AKBC 2010 in Grenoble: a two-day meeting that included an afternoon hike in the Alps with much great scientific discussion.
Why now? Growing interest across many areas. Disconnect among multiple relevant communities. Growing industry and government interest.
Program
The program consists of 13 invited talks, oral and poster presentations of submitted papers, as well as a day of workshops. A list of accepted conference papers can be found here: https://openreview.net/group?id=AKBC.ws/2019/Conference
Invited Talks
Waleed Ammar (AI2)
Danqi Chen (Princeton)
Yejin Choi (UW, AI2)
Laura Dietz (UNH)
Lise Getoor (UCSC)
Alexandra Meliou (UMass)
Fernando Pereira (Google)
Hoifung Poon (MSR)
Chris Re (Stanford and Apple)
Sebastian Riedel (UCL and Facebook)
Guy Van den Broeck (UCLA)
Claudia Wagner (Leibniz Institute for Social Sciences)
Chris Welty (Google)
Registration
Conference registration is possible via https://umass.irisregistration.com/Home/Site?code=AKBC for rates between 250 and 450 USD, which includes a banquet dinner and social event ticket, among other things. Early registration is open until 5 April, hotel rooms reserved for participants are held until 21 April. More information on registration and visa applications can be found here: http://www.akbc.ws/2019/registration/.
Call for Workshop Participation
In addition to the two-day conference program, we will have a one-day collection of workshops on focused topics. Rather than accepting disjoint workshop proposals, this year we will have a community-driven process for devising workshop topics and organizers. Please visit http://www.akbc.ws/2019/workshops/ for more details.
Current workshops are:
- Neural and Symbolic Representation and Reasoning
- Scientific Literature Knowledge Bases
- Knowledge Bases and Multiple Modalities
Workshops accept abstract and paper submissions with deadlines in early April. Please check the individual workshop websites for further details.
Organizers
General Chair Andrew McCallum, University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA
Program Co-chair Isabelle Augenstein, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Program Co-chair Sameer Singh, University of California Irvine, USA
Workshop Co-chair Xiang Ren, USC, USA
Workshop Co-chair Partha Pratim Talukdar, IISc, Bangalore, India
Funding Chair Sebastian Riedel, University College London, UK
Local Co-chair Ari Kobren, University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA
Local Co-chair Nicholas Monath, University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA
Area Chairs
Lora Aroyo
Kai-Wei Chang
Luna Dong
Matt Gardner
Paul Groth
Hannaneh Hajishirzi
Roman Klinger
Max Nickel
Jay Pujara
Siva Reddy
Tim Rocktäschel
Sunita Sarawagi
Michael Wick
Luke Zettlemoyer
Questions? Please mail info [at] akbc.ws.