97 research outputs found
Mobile Phone Text Processing and Question-Answering
Mobile phone text messaging between mobile users and information services is a growing area of
Information Systems. Users may require the service to provide an answer to queries, or may, in wikistyle, want to contribute to the service by texting in some information within the service’s domain of discourse. Given the volume of such messaging it is essential to do the processing through an automated service. Further, in the case of repeated use of the service, the quality of such a response has the potential to benefit from a dynamic user profile that the service can build up from previous texts of the same user.
This project will investigate the potential for creating such intelligent mobile phone services and aims to produce a computational model to enable their efficient implementation. To make the project feasible, the scope of the automated service is considered to lie within a limited domain of, for example, information about entertainment within a specific town centre. The project will assume the existence of a model of objects within the domain of discourse, hence allowing the analysis of texts within the context of a user model and a domain model. Hence, the project will involve the subject areas of natural language processing, language engineering, machine learning, knowledge extraction, and ontological engineering
Reading Wikipedia to Answer Open-Domain Questions
This paper proposes to tackle open- domain question answering using Wikipedia
as the unique knowledge source: the answer to any factoid question is a text
span in a Wikipedia article. This task of machine reading at scale combines the
challenges of document retrieval (finding the relevant articles) with that of
machine comprehension of text (identifying the answer spans from those
articles). Our approach combines a search component based on bigram hashing and
TF-IDF matching with a multi-layer recurrent neural network model trained to
detect answers in Wikipedia paragraphs. Our experiments on multiple existing QA
datasets indicate that (1) both modules are highly competitive with respect to
existing counterparts and (2) multitask learning using distant supervision on
their combination is an effective complete system on this challenging task.Comment: ACL2017, 10 page
Evaluating Semantic Parsing against a Simple Web-based Question Answering Model
Semantic parsing shines at analyzing complex natural language that involves
composition and computation over multiple pieces of evidence. However, datasets
for semantic parsing contain many factoid questions that can be answered from a
single web document. In this paper, we propose to evaluate semantic
parsing-based question answering models by comparing them to a question
answering baseline that queries the web and extracts the answer only from web
snippets, without access to the target knowledge-base. We investigate this
approach on COMPLEXQUESTIONS, a dataset designed to focus on compositional
language, and find that our model obtains reasonable performance (35 F1
compared to 41 F1 of state-of-the-art). We find in our analysis that our model
performs well on complex questions involving conjunctions, but struggles on
questions that involve relation composition and superlatives.Comment: *sem 201
Controlling Risk of Web Question Answering
Web question answering (QA) has become an indispensable component in modern
search systems, which can significantly improve users' search experience by
providing a direct answer to users' information need. This could be achieved by
applying machine reading comprehension (MRC) models over the retrieved passages
to extract answers with respect to the search query. With the development of
deep learning techniques, state-of-the-art MRC performances have been achieved
by recent deep methods. However, existing studies on MRC seldom address the
predictive uncertainty issue, i.e., how likely the prediction of an MRC model
is wrong, leading to uncontrollable risks in real-world Web QA applications. In
this work, we first conduct an in-depth investigation over the risk of Web QA.
We then introduce a novel risk control framework, which consists of a qualify
model for uncertainty estimation using the probe idea, and a decision model for
selectively output. For evaluation, we introduce risk-related metrics, rather
than the traditional EM and F1 in MRC, for the evaluation of risk-aware Web QA.
The empirical results over both the real-world Web QA dataset and the academic
MRC benchmark collection demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.Comment: 42nd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development
in Information Retrieva
Adaptive Document Retrieval for Deep Question Answering
State-of-the-art systems in deep question answering proceed as follows: (1)
an initial document retrieval selects relevant documents, which (2) are then
processed by a neural network in order to extract the final answer. Yet the
exact interplay between both components is poorly understood, especially
concerning the number of candidate documents that should be retrieved. We show
that choosing a static number of documents -- as used in prior research --
suffers from a noise-information trade-off and yields suboptimal results. As a
remedy, we propose an adaptive document retrieval model. This learns the
optimal candidate number for document retrieval, conditional on the size of the
corpus and the query. We report extensive experimental results showing that our
adaptive approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods on multiple benchmark
datasets, as well as in the context of corpora with variable sizes.Comment: EMNLP 201
Answering Complex Questions Using Open Information Extraction
While there has been substantial progress in factoid question-answering (QA),
answering complex questions remains challenging, typically requiring both a
large body of knowledge and inference techniques. Open Information Extraction
(Open IE) provides a way to generate semi-structured knowledge for QA, but to
date such knowledge has only been used to answer simple questions with
retrieval-based methods. We overcome this limitation by presenting a method for
reasoning with Open IE knowledge, allowing more complex questions to be
handled. Using a recently proposed support graph optimization framework for QA,
we develop a new inference model for Open IE, in particular one that can work
effectively with multiple short facts, noise, and the relational structure of
tuples. Our model significantly outperforms a state-of-the-art structured
solver on complex questions of varying difficulty, while also removing the
reliance on manually curated knowledge.Comment: Accepted as short paper at ACL 201
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