What Users Ask a Search Engine: Analyzing One Billion Russian Question Queries

We analyze the question queries submitted to a large commercial web search engine to get insights about what people ask, and to better tailor the search results to the users’ needs. Based on a dataset of about one billion question queries submitted during the year 2012, we investigate askers’ querying behavior with the support of automatic query categorization. While the importance of question queries is likely to increase, at present they only make up 3–4% of the total search traffic. Since questions are such a small part of the query stream and are more likely to be unique than shorter queries, clickthrough information is typically rather sparse. Thus, query categorization methods based on the categories of clicked web documents do not work well for questions. As an alternative, we propose a robust question query classification method that uses the labeled questions from a large community question answering platform (CQA) as a training set. The resulting classifier is then transferred to the web search questions. Even though questions on CQA platforms tend to be different to web search questions, our categorization method proves competitive with strong baselines with respect to classification accuracy. To show the scalability of our proposed method we apply the classifiers to about one billion question queries and discuss the trade-offs between performance and accuracy that different classification models offer. Our findings reveal what people ask a search engine and also how this contrasts behavior on a CQA platform

A Factoid Question Answering System for Vietnamese

In this paper, we describe the development of an end-to-end factoid question answering system for the Vietnamese language. This system combines both statistical models and ontology-based methods in a chain of processing modules to provide high-quality mappings from natural language text to entities. We present the challenges in the development of such an intelligent user interface for an isolating language like Vietnamese and show that techniques developed for inflectional languages cannot be applied "as is". Our question answering system can answer a wide range of general knowledge questions with promising accuracy on a test set.Comment: In the proceedings of the HQA'18 workshop, The Web Conference Companion, Lyon, Franc

Answer Sequence Learning with Neural Networks for Answer Selection in Community Question Answering

In this paper, the answer selection problem in community question answering (CQA) is regarded as an answer sequence labeling task, and a novel approach is proposed based on the recurrent architecture for this problem. Our approach applies convolution neural networks (CNNs) to learning the joint representation of question-answer pair firstly, and then uses the joint representation as input of the long short-term memory (LSTM) to learn the answer sequence of a question for labeling the matching quality of each answer. Experiments conducted on the SemEval 2015 CQA dataset shows the effectiveness of our approach.Comment: 6 page

Follow-up question handling in the IMIX and Ritel systems: A comparative study

One of the basic topics of question answering (QA) dialogue systems is how follow-up questions should be interpreted by a QA system. In this paper, we shall discuss our experience with the IMIX and Ritel systems, for both of which a follow-up question handling scheme has been developed, and corpora have been collected. These two systems are each other's opposites in many respects: IMIX is multimodal, non-factoid, black-box QA, while Ritel is speech, factoid, keyword-based QA. Nevertheless, we will show that they are quite comparable, and that it is fruitful to examine the similarities and differences. We shall look at how the systems are composed, and how real, non-expert, users interact with the systems. We shall also provide comparisons with systems from the literature where possible, and indicate where open issues lie and in what areas existing systems may be improved. We conclude that most systems have a common architecture with a set of common subtasks, in particular detecting follow-up questions and finding referents for them. We characterise these tasks using the typical techniques used for performing them, and data from our corpora. We also identify a special type of follow-up question, the discourse question, which is asked when the user is trying to understand an answer, and propose some basic methods for handling it