The huge and rapidly increasing amount of structured and unstructured data available on the Web makes it both possible and necessary to support users in finding relevant information. The trend moves more and more towards smart knowledge services that are able to find information, aggregate them, draw inferences, and present succinct answers without requiring the user to wade through a large number of documents. The novel avenues made possible by knowledge services are numerous and diverse, including ubiquitous information access (from smartphones, tablets, smart watches, etc.), barrier-free access to data (especially for the blind and disabled) and knowledge discovery.

Over the last years, several challenges and calls for research projects have pointed out the dire need for pushing natural language interfaces. In this context, the importance of Semantic Web data as a premier knowledge source is rapidly increasing. But we are still far from having accurate natural language interfaces that allow handling complex information needs in a user-centric and highly performant manner. The development of such interfaces requires the collaboration of a range of different fields, including natural language processing, information extraction, knowledge base construction and population, reasoning, and question answering.

The main goal of this workshop is to join forces in the collaborative development of open frameworks for knowledge extraction and question answering, to share standards, and to foster the creation of an ecosystem of tools and benchmarks. The workshop will therefore not only comprise short and long paper presentations but also a hands-on session on already existing frameworks, standards, and benchmarking campaigns, as well as a social meet-up.