日本データベース学会会員の皆様， WebDB Forum 2016 iDB特別セッション委員の白川です． WebDB Forum 2016の二日目のセッションの一部として開催される iDB特別セッションの詳細についてご案内いたします． 日時: 2016年9月14日(水)（WebDB Forum 2016 開催期間中） 場所: 慶應義塾大学 日吉キャンパス URL: http://db-event.jpn.org/webdbf2016/ SIGMOD, VLDB, ICDEなどのデータ工学分野において圧倒的なプレゼンスを持つ Professor Xiaofang Zhou (The University of Queensland, Australia, URL: http://staff.itee.uq.edu.au/zxf/ )を招聘し，招待講演および若手 研究者とのミニワークショップを開催します． 【スケジュール】 1. 招待講演（12:30-13:30） 2. ミニワークショップ（15:30-17:30） 【招待講演】 ・講演者 Xiaofang Zhou (The University of Queensland, Australia) ・タイトル Short Text Understanding: A Database Approach ・概要 Understanding short texts is crucial to many applications, but challenges abound. First, short texts do not always observe the syntax of a written language. As a result, traditional natural language processing methods cannot be easily applied. Second, short texts usually do not contain sufficient statistical signals to support many state-of-the-art approaches for text processing such as topic modeling. Third, short texts are usually more ambiguous. We argue that knowledge is needed in order to better understand short texts. In this work, we use lexical-semantic knowledge provided by a well-known semantic network for short text understanding. Our knowledge-intensive approach disrupts traditional methods for tasks such as text segmentation, part-of-speech tagging, and concept labeling, in the sense that we focus on semantics in all these tasks. We conduct a comprehensive performance evaluation on real-life data. The results show that knowledge is indispensable for short text understanding, and our knowledge-intensive approaches are effective in harvesting semantics of short texts. We also extend our work to handle entity linking in microblogs. ・プロフィール Professor Xiaofang Zhou is a Professor of Computer Science at The University of Queensland, Australia, leading the Data and Knowledge Engineering (DKE) Group at UQ. His research focus is to find effective and efficient solutions for managing, integrating and analyzing very large amount of complex data for business, scientific and personal applications. He has been working in the area of spatial and multimedia databases, data quality, high performance database systems and data mining. He is a Program Committee Chair for IEEE ICDE 2013, CIKM 2016 and a General Chair of ACM Multimedia 2015. He has been an Associate Editor of The VLDB Journal, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing, World Wide Web Journal, Distributed and Parallel Databases, and IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin. He is the current Chair of IEEE Technical Committee on Data Engineering (TCDE). He is also an Adjunct Professor in Soochow University in China, leading Soochow Advanced Data Analytics Lab there. 【ミニワークショップ】 データ工学に関連する分野の博士課程学生（進学予定含む）および学位取得後 数年の若手研究者を対象としたミニワークショップです． 発表者の研究テーマに関し，Professor Xiaofang Zhou をメンターとして， 難関国際会議・ジャーナルを目指して自由闊達な議論を行います． 発表希望の方は先にdbjapanに流しました発表者募集メールをご覧ください． 【iDB特別セッション企画委員会】 iDB特別セッション委員長: 小口 正人（お茶の水女子大学） iDB特別セッション委員: 白川 真澄（大阪大学） -- 白川 真澄 (Masumi Shirakawa) 大阪大学 大学院情報科学研究科 マルチメディア工学専攻 マルチメディアデータ工学講座 〒565-0871 大阪府吹田市山田丘1-5 TEL: 06-6879-4513 FAX: 06-6879-4514 Email: shirakawa.masumi@ist.osaka-u.ac.jp