57,396 research outputs found
Answering Why-not Questions on Reverse Top-k Queries
Why-not questions, which aim to seek clarifications on the missing tuples for query results, have recently received considerable attention from the database community. In this paper, we systematically explore
why-not questions on reverse top-k queries
, owing to its importance in multi-criteria decision making. Given an initial reverse top-
k
query and a missing/why-not weighting vector set
W
m
that is absent from the query result, why-not questions on reverse top-
k
queries explain why
W
m
does not appear in the query result and provide suggestions on how to refine the initial query with minimum penalty to include
W
m
in the refined query result. We first formalize why-not questions on reverse top-
k
queries and reveal their semantics, and then propose a
unified framework
called
WQRTQ
to answer why-not questions on both
monochromatic
and
bichromatic
reverse top-
k
queries. Our framework offers three solutions, namely, (i) modifying a query point
q
, (ii) modifying a why-not weighting vector set
W
m
and a parameter
k
, and (iii) modifying
q
,
W
m
, and
k
simultaneously, to cater for different application scenarios. Extensive experimental evaluation using both real and synthetic data sets verifies the effectiveness and efficiency of the presented algorithms.
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Negative Statements Considered Useful
Knowledge bases (KBs), pragmatic collections of knowledge about notable entities, are an important asset in applications such as search, question answering and dialogue. Rooted in a long tradition in knowledge representation, all popular KBs only store positive information, while they abstain from taking any stance towards statements not contained in them. In this paper, we make the case for explicitly stating interesting statements which are not true. Negative statements would be important to overcome current limitations of question answering, yet due to their potential abundance, any effort towards compiling them needs a tight coupling with ranking. We introduce two approaches towards compiling negative statements. (i) In peer-based statistical inferences, we compare entities with highly related entities in order to derive potential negative statements, which we then rank using supervised and unsupervised features. (ii) In query-log-based text extraction, we use a pattern-based approach for harvesting search engine query logs. Experimental results show that both approaches hold promising and complementary potential. Along with this paper, we publish the first datasets on interesting negative information, containing over 1.1M statements for 100K popular Wikidata entities
ANTIQUE: A Non-Factoid Question Answering Benchmark
Considering the widespread use of mobile and voice search, answer passage
retrieval for non-factoid questions plays a critical role in modern information
retrieval systems. Despite the importance of the task, the community still
feels the significant lack of large-scale non-factoid question answering
collections with real questions and comprehensive relevance judgments. In this
paper, we develop and release a collection of 2,626 open-domain non-factoid
questions from a diverse set of categories. The dataset, called ANTIQUE,
contains 34,011 manual relevance annotations. The questions were asked by real
users in a community question answering service, i.e., Yahoo! Answers.
Relevance judgments for all the answers to each question were collected through
crowdsourcing. To facilitate further research, we also include a brief analysis
of the data as well as baseline results on both classical and recently
developed neural IR models
Matching Queries to Frequently Asked Questions: Search Functionality for the MRSA Web-Portal
As part of the long-term EUREGIO MRSA-net project a system was developed which enables health care workers and the general public to quickly find answers to their questions regarding the MRSA pathogen. This paper focuses on how these questions can be answered using Information Retrieval (IR) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques on a Frequently-Asked-Questions-style (FAQ) database
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
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