Computational Linguistics Proceedings of the workshop on Knowledge and Reasoning for Answering Questions (KRAQ’08) Workshop chairs:

We are pleased to introduce this fourth edition of KRAQ, a workshop dedicated to question-answering which alternates between ACL or COLING on the one hand and IJCAI on the other, due to the themes it addresses. Motivations for this workshop are quite large, and correspond to major foundational as well as applied aspects of question-answering. Indeed, confronted with large information databases there is an urgent need for retrieving concise answers to information needs, possibly fused from different sources. Question answering (QA) systems that intelligently and cooperatively respond to the user’s questions posed in natural language aim at realizing this goal. Reasoning is here regarded as an important issue, both practical and foundational. Although quite advanced reasoning models are around for several years in closed domain QA, it is only recently that open domain QA has recognized the potential of automated reasoning. Performances in the recent TREC-QA tracks show that inferencing substantially improves the response relevance and accuracy. There is still a long way to go before we can consider our document repositories (such as the World Wide Web) as a huge knowledge base with question answering technology acting a