882 research outputs found
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
Improving Retrieval-Based Question Answering with Deep Inference Models
Question answering is one of the most important and difficult applications at
the border of information retrieval and natural language processing, especially
when we talk about complex science questions which require some form of
inference to determine the correct answer. In this paper, we present a two-step
method that combines information retrieval techniques optimized for question
answering with deep learning models for natural language inference in order to
tackle the multi-choice question answering in the science domain. For each
question-answer pair, we use standard retrieval-based models to find relevant
candidate contexts and decompose the main problem into two different
sub-problems. First, assign correctness scores for each candidate answer based
on the context using retrieval models from Lucene. Second, we use deep learning
architectures to compute if a candidate answer can be inferred from some
well-chosen context consisting of sentences retrieved from the knowledge base.
In the end, all these solvers are combined using a simple neural network to
predict the correct answer. This proposed two-step model outperforms the best
retrieval-based solver by over 3% in absolute accuracy.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures, 8 tables, accepted at IJCNN 201
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Proceedings of QG2010: The Third Workshop on Question Generation
These are the peer-reviewed proceedings of "QG2010, The Third Workshop on Question Generation". The workshop included a special track for "QGSTEC2010: The First Question Generation Shared Task and Evaluation Challenge".
QG2010 was held as part of The Tenth International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS2010)
Learning to Rank Question Answer Pairs with Holographic Dual LSTM Architecture
We describe a new deep learning architecture for learning to rank question
answer pairs. Our approach extends the long short-term memory (LSTM) network
with holographic composition to model the relationship between question and
answer representations. As opposed to the neural tensor layer that has been
adopted recently, the holographic composition provides the benefits of scalable
and rich representational learning approach without incurring huge parameter
costs. Overall, we present Holographic Dual LSTM (HD-LSTM), a unified
architecture for both deep sentence modeling and semantic matching.
Essentially, our model is trained end-to-end whereby the parameters of the LSTM
are optimized in a way that best explains the correlation between question and
answer representations. In addition, our proposed deep learning architecture
requires no extensive feature engineering. Via extensive experiments, we show
that HD-LSTM outperforms many other neural architectures on two popular
benchmark QA datasets. Empirical studies confirm the effectiveness of
holographic composition over the neural tensor layer.Comment: SIGIR 2017 Full Pape
Cross Temporal Recurrent Networks for Ranking Question Answer Pairs
Temporal gates play a significant role in modern recurrent-based neural
encoders, enabling fine-grained control over recursive compositional operations
over time. In recurrent models such as the long short-term memory (LSTM),
temporal gates control the amount of information retained or discarded over
time, not only playing an important role in influencing the learned
representations but also serving as a protection against vanishing gradients.
This paper explores the idea of learning temporal gates for sequence pairs
(question and answer), jointly influencing the learned representations in a
pairwise manner. In our approach, temporal gates are learned via 1D
convolutional layers and then subsequently cross applied across question and
answer for joint learning. Empirically, we show that this conceptually simple
sharing of temporal gates can lead to competitive performance across multiple
benchmarks. Intuitively, what our network achieves can be interpreted as
learning representations of question and answer pairs that are aware of what
each other is remembering or forgetting, i.e., pairwise temporal gating. Via
extensive experiments, we show that our proposed model achieves
state-of-the-art performance on two community-based QA datasets and competitive
performance on one factoid-based QA dataset.Comment: Accepted to AAAI201
Towards automatic generation of multimodal answers to medical questions: a cognitive engineering approach
This paper describes a production experiment carried out to determine which modalities people choose to answer different types of questions. In this experiment participants had to create (multimodal) presentations of answers to general medical questions. The collected answer presentations were coded on types of manipulations (typographic, spatial, graphical), presence of visual media (i.e., photos, graphics, and animations), functions and position of these visual media. The results of a first analysis indicated that participants presented the information in a multimodal way. Moreover, significant differences were found in the information presentation of different answer and question types
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