Topics of interest

FQAS is the premier conference focusing on the key issue in the information society of providing easy, flexible, intuitive access to information for everybody.  In targeting this issue, the conference draws on several research areas, such as information retrieval, knowledge representation, soft computing, databases, multimedia, and human-computer interaction.  The conference provides a unique opportunity for researchers, developers and practitioners to explore new ideas and approaches in a multidisciplinary forum.   The previous FQAS events were held in 1994, 1996, and 1998, all in Roskilde, Denmark.

As a metaphor for flexible query answering we may consider a human intermediary that has expertise in the topic of the query, and is experienced in identifying the user’s information needs and answering the needs from the available information resources.  Using knowledge on relevant context, available information resources, etc., enables the expert to respond rather precisely to the needs, though the query, per se, may be imprecise, incomplete, etc.   Thus, a key issue for flexible query answering system is to obtain, maintain, represent, and utilize such knowledge.  This comprises domain knowledge and metaknowledge, its representation and organization in ontologies, terminologies, etc., its creation through dictionaries, lexicons, learning, knowledge discovery, data mining, etc., and its utilization for context recognition, disambiguation, needs identification, etc.  Natural language and speech access, multimedia information, and the Internet give rise to new problems and solutions in FQAS.  Other important issues in FQAS include information access modes (such as querying and navigation, and answer presentation), human-computer interaction (including modalities and usability factors), and evaluation of FQAS.

Topics areas include the following, as listed with keywords for subtopics: