Speaker: Dr. Saeedeh Shekarpour Affiliation: University of Dayton Location: Innovation Center, Room 2277 Time: Friday 02/21/2020 (10:15 - 11:15am) Question Answering (QA) systems are becoming an inspiring model for the future of search engines. While, recently, datasets underlying QA systems have been promoted from unstructured datasets to structured datasets with semantically highly enriched metadata, question answering systems are still facing serious challenges and are therefore not meeting users’ expectations. Especially, question answering over interlinked data sources is raising new challenges due to two inherent characteristics. First, different datasets employ heterogeneous schemas and each one may only contain a part of the answer to a certain question. Second, constructing a federated formal query across different datasets requires exploiting links between them on both the schema and instance levels. This talk will be conducted in the three following directions:

1. SINA strategies for addressing the salient challenges of QA systems [1,2,3]
2. Re-engineering Question Answering Systems [4,5,6]
3. A look to the future

Minor Part (20 minutes) This part covers the other research directions which I am involving, such as the challenges related to misinformation, information extraction, social media analytics. Saeedeh Shekarpour is an assistant professor at the University of Dayton, Ohio. She accomplished her Ph.D. at the University of Bonn in Germany. Saeedeh also spent one year as a postdoctoral researcher in the EIS research group at the Bonn University and two years as a postdoctoral researcher at Knoesis research center. She is passionate to conduct advanced research in the following fields: (i) Knowledge representation in AI technologies, such as Question Answering, chatbot technology (ii) Information Disorder (fake news, harassing language) (iii) Ontology Development, (iv) Text and knowledge Analytics. She successfully published her research results in the most renowned conferences and journals of her field including the World Wide Web, AAAI, NAACL, Web Intelligence conference, Web science, Journal of Web Semantics, Semantic Web Journal, and PLOS ONE.