51,295 research outputs found
Looking Under the Hood : Tools for Diagnosing your Question Answering Engine
In this paper we analyze two question answering tasks : the TREC-8 question
answering task and a set of reading comprehension exams. First, we show that
Q/A systems perform better when there are multiple answer opportunities per
question. Next, we analyze common approaches to two subproblems: term overlap
for answer sentence identification, and answer typing for short answer
extraction. We present general tools for analyzing the strengths and
limitations of techniques for these subproblems. Our results quantify the
limitations of both term overlap and answer typing to distinguish between
competing answer candidates.Comment: Revision of paper appearing in the Proceedings of the Workshop on
Open-Domain Question Answerin
"Scholarly Hypertext: Self-Represented Complexity"
Scholarly hypertexts involve argument and explicit selfquestioning, and can be distinguished from both informational and literary hypertexts. After making these distinctions the essay presents general principles about attention, some suggestions for self-representational multi-level structures that would enhance scholarly inquiry, and a wish list of software capabilities to support such structures. The essay concludes with a discussion of possible conflicts between scholarly inquiry and hypertext
Towards Avatars with Artificial Minds: Role of Semantic Memory
he first step towards creating avatars with human-like artificial minds is to give them human-like memory structures with an access to general knowledge about the world. This type of knowledge is stored in semantic memory. Although many approaches to modeling of semantic memories have been proposed they are not very useful in real life applications because they lack knowledge comparable to the common sense that humans have, and they cannot be implemented in a computationally efficient way. The most drastic simplification of semantic memory leading to the simplest knowledge representation that is sufficient for many applications is based on the Concept Description Vectors (CDVs) that store, for each concept, an information whether a given property is applicable to this concept or not. Unfortunately even such simple information about real objects or concepts is not available. Experiments with automatic creation of concept description vectors from various sources, including ontologies, dictionaries, encyclopedias and unstructured text sources are described. Haptek-based talking head that has an access to this memory has been created as an example of a humanized interface (HIT) that can interact with web pages and exchange information in a natural way. A few examples of applications of an avatar with semantic memory are given, including the twenty questions game and automatic creation of word puzzles
Controlled Experimentation in Naturalistic Mobile Settings
Performing controlled user experiments on small devices in naturalistic
mobile settings has always proved to be a difficult undertaking for many Human
Factors researchers. Difficulties exist, not least, because mimicking natural
small device usage suffers from a lack of unobtrusive data to guide
experimental design, and then validate that the experiment is proceeding
naturally.Here we use observational data to derive a set of protocols and a
simple checklist of validations which can be built into the design of any
controlled experiment focused on the user interface of a small device. These,
have been used within a series of experimental designs to measure the utility
and application of experimental software. The key-point is the validation
checks -- based on the observed behaviour of 400 mobile users -- to ratify that
a controlled experiment is being perceived as natural by the user. While the
design of the experimental route which the user follows is a major factor in
the experimental setup, without check validations based on unobtrusive observed
data there can be no certainty that an experiment designed to be natural is
actually progressing as the design implies.Comment: 12 pages, 3 table
The universe as quantum computer
This article reviews the history of digital computation, and investigates
just how far the concept of computation can be taken. In particular, I address
the question of whether the universe itself is in fact a giant computer, and if
so, just what kind of computer it is. I will show that the universe can be
regarded as a giant quantum computer. The quantum computational model of the
universe explains a variety of observed phenomena not encompassed by the
ordinary laws of physics. In particular, the model shows that the the quantum
computational universe automatically gives rise to a mix of randomness and
order, and to both simple and complex systems.Comment: 16 pages, LaTe
Crowdsourcing Question-Answer Meaning Representations
We introduce Question-Answer Meaning Representations (QAMRs), which represent
the predicate-argument structure of a sentence as a set of question-answer
pairs. We also develop a crowdsourcing scheme to show that QAMRs can be labeled
with very little training, and gather a dataset with over 5,000 sentences and
100,000 questions. A detailed qualitative analysis demonstrates that the
crowd-generated question-answer pairs cover the vast majority of
predicate-argument relationships in existing datasets (including PropBank,
NomBank, QA-SRL, and AMR) along with many previously under-resourced ones,
including implicit arguments and relations. The QAMR data and annotation code
is made publicly available to enable future work on how best to model these
complex phenomena.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures, 2 table
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