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

Identifying Unclear Questions in Community Question Answering Websites

Thousands of complex natural language questions are submitted to community question answering websites on a daily basis, rendering them as one of the most important information sources these days. However, oftentimes submitted questions are unclear and cannot be answered without further clarification questions by expert community members. This study is the first to investigate the complex task of classifying a question as clear or unclear, i.e., if it requires further clarification. We construct a novel dataset and propose a classification approach that is based on the notion of similar questions. This approach is compared to state-of-the-art text classification baselines. Our main finding is that the similar questions approach is a viable alternative that can be used as a stepping stone towards the development of supportive user interfaces for question formulation.Comment: Proceedings of the 41th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR '19), 201

Что и как спрашивают в социальных вопросно-ответных сервисах по-русски?

In our study we surveyed different approaches to the study of questions in traditional linguistics, question answering (QA), and, recently, in community question answering (CQA). We adapted a functional-semantic classification scheme for CQA data and manually labeled 2,000 questions in Russian originating from [email protected] CQA service. About half of them are purely conversational and do not aim at obtaining actual information. In the subset of meaningful questions the major classes are requests for recommendations, or how-questions, and fact-seeking questions. The data demonstrate a variety of interrogative sentences as well as a host of formally non-interrogative expressions with the meaning of questions and requests. The observations can be of interest both for linguistics and for practical applications

Power of Interviewer in `Kick Andy` on Metro TV

Penelitian ini berjudul “Power of Interviewer in Kick Andy on Metro TV”. Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk menggambarkan kekuasaan pewawancara yang digunakan Andy F Noya terhadap bintang tamu dalam talk show Kick Andy. Bentuk penelitian yang digunakan adalah deskriptif kualitatif. Dalam penelitian ini digunakan data rekaman sebagai alat koleksi data dengan menggunakan 2 data sampel percakapan antara pewawancara (IR) dan narasumber (IE), yakni episode “Reformasi Ala Amin Rais” dan “More Heroes Big Action”. Penelitian inimenggunakan beberapa pendekatan meliputi; discourse, power, cooperative and politeness principle dan conversation analysis. Hasil dari penelitian ini menunjukkan bahwa IR memiliki kekuasaan terhadap IE. Terdapat bentuk-bentuk kekuasaan yang dimiliki IR dalam wawancara; (1) IR berkuasa untuk mengendalikan jalannya wawancara, termasuk mengendalikan IE, (2) IR lebih menerapkan prinsip kooperatif Grice daripada IE, (3) IR berkuasa untuk membuat rangkaian pertanyaan terhadap IE, (4) IR sedikit menerapkan prinsipkesopanan Leech dibandingkan IE, (5) IR bertanya dalam bentuk single-word, single-phrase, dan single-clauseturn, (6) Berdasarkan alokasi giliran bicara, kekuasaan IR meliputi, IR mengalokasikan diri sendiri dan mitra tutur (IE) yang dikehendaki bahkan IR juga berkuasa untuk menerima, mengabaikan, serta untuk tidak menjawab pertanyaan dari IE, (7) IR berkuasa untuk membuka dan menutup sebuah percakapan serta membentuk sekuen percakapan yang IR inginkan, (8) IR melakukan tindakan interupsi kooperatif bentuk klarifikasi daninterupsi kompetitif

Critical Thinking Skills of Prospective Elementary School Teachers in Integrated Science-Mathematics Lectures

The purpose of this study is to find out the critical thinking skills indicators and aspects of prospective elementary school teachers in mathematics-science integration lectures on electrical circuits and mathematical logic lesson. This research uses random sampling technique in which 30 first semester students were chosen randomly from one of university in Padang region West Sumatera Indonesia. This research uses Research and Development (R & D). The critical thinking skills are seen from processes, observations, and tests. The process of critical thinking skills of prospective elementary school teachers on the average of critical thinking skills indicator is 84% in strategies and tactics, 80% in advanced clarification and 83% in elementary clarification, basic support, and inference. The result of observing the critical thinking skills of prospective elementary school teachers on the average of each lectures is significantly increased to be 81.9%. The results of pre-test and post-test were increased significantly. It is shown from N-gain of 0.7 to be medium category

Weight of evidence: a framework for the appraisal of the quality and relevance of evidence

Knowledge use and production is complex and so also are attempts to judge its quality. Research synthesis is a set of formal processes to determine what is known from research in relation to different research questions and this process requires judgements of the quality and relevance of the research evidence considered. Such judgement can be according to generic standards or be specific to the review question. The judgements interact with other judgements in the review process such as inclusion criteria and search strategies and can be absolute or weighted judgements combined in a weight of evidence framework. Judgments also vary depending upon the type of review that can range from statistical meta analysis to meta ethnography. Empirical study of the ways that quality and relevance judgements are made can illuminate the nature of such decisions and their impact on epistemic and other domains of knowledge. Greater clarity about such ideological and theoretical differences can enable greater participative debates about such differences

Communicative Acts Performance of an Indonesian Child

This study attempts to describe the communicative acts of an Indonesian child by using the coding system of speech acts proposed by Ninio and Snow. The data are the subject\u27s spoken utterances which were recorded. The findings show that the subject performed (in frequency of occurrence order) Questions and Responses (33.96%), Directives and Responses (25.15%), Statements and Responses (19.49%), Markings and Responses (7.54%0), Evaluations (5.66%), Commitments and Responses (5.66%), Declarations and Responses (1.25%), and Speech Elicitations and Responses (1.25%). The Performances and Demands for Clarifications were not performed by the subject at all