67,386 research outputs found
A study on the use of summaries and summary-based query expansion for a question-answering task
In this paper we report an initial study on the effectiveness of query-biased summaries for a question answering task. Our summarisation system presents searchers with short summaries of documents. The summaries are composed of a set of sentences that highlight the main points of the document as they relate to the query. These summaries are also used as evidence for a query expansion algorithm to test the use of summaries as evidence for interactive and automatic query expansion. We present the results of a set of experiments to test these two approaches and discuss the relative success of these techniques
Question-answering, relevance feedback and summarisation : TREC-9 interactive track report
In this paper we report on the effectiveness of query-biased summaries for a question-answering task. Our summarisation system presents searchers with short summaries of documents, composed of a series of highly matching sentences extracted from the documents. These summaries are also used as evidence for a query expansion algorithm to test the use of summaries as evidence for interactive and automatic query expansion
Sequence to Sequence Learning for Query Expansion
Using sequence to sequence algorithms for query expansion has not been
explored yet in Information Retrieval literature nor in Question-Answering's.
We tried to fill this gap in the literature with a custom Query Expansion
engine trained and tested on open datasets. Starting from open datasets, we
built a Query Expansion training set using sentence-embeddings-based Keyword
Extraction. We therefore assessed the ability of the Sequence to Sequence
neural networks to capture expanding relations in the words embeddings' space.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures, AAAI-19 Student Abstract and Poster Progra
Concept-based Interactive Query Expansion Support Tool (CIQUEST)
This report describes a three-year project (2000-03) undertaken in the Information Studies
Department at The University of Sheffield and funded by Resource, The Council for
Museums, Archives and Libraries. The overall aim of the research was to provide user
support for query formulation and reformulation in searching large-scale textual resources
including those of the World Wide Web. More specifically the objectives were: to investigate
and evaluate methods for the automatic generation and organisation of concepts derived from
retrieved document sets, based on statistical methods for term weighting; and to conduct
user-based evaluations on the understanding, presentation and retrieval effectiveness of
concept structures in selecting candidate terms for interactive query expansion.
The TREC test collection formed the basis for the seven evaluative experiments conducted in
the course of the project. These formed four distinct phases in the project plan. In the first
phase, a series of experiments was conducted to investigate further techniques for concept
derivation and hierarchical organisation and structure. The second phase was concerned with
user-based validation of the concept structures. Results of phases 1 and 2 informed on the
design of the test system and the user interface was developed in phase 3. The final phase
entailed a user-based summative evaluation of the CiQuest system.
The main findings demonstrate that concept hierarchies can effectively be generated from
sets of retrieved documents and displayed to searchers in a meaningful way. The approach
provides the searcher with an overview of the contents of the retrieved documents, which in
turn facilitates the viewing of documents and selection of the most relevant ones. Concept
hierarchies are a good source of terms for query expansion and can improve precision. The
extraction of descriptive phrases as an alternative source of terms was also effective. With
respect to presentation, cascading menus were easy to browse for selecting terms and for
viewing documents. In conclusion the project dissemination programme and future work are
outlined
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
Off the Beaten Path: Let's Replace Term-Based Retrieval with k-NN Search
Retrieval pipelines commonly rely on a term-based search to obtain candidate
records, which are subsequently re-ranked. Some candidates are missed by this
approach, e.g., due to a vocabulary mismatch. We address this issue by
replacing the term-based search with a generic k-NN retrieval algorithm, where
a similarity function can take into account subtle term associations. While an
exact brute-force k-NN search using this similarity function is slow, we
demonstrate that an approximate algorithm can be nearly two orders of magnitude
faster at the expense of only a small loss in accuracy. A retrieval pipeline
using an approximate k-NN search can be more effective and efficient than the
term-based pipeline. This opens up new possibilities for designing effective
retrieval pipelines. Our software (including data-generating code) and
derivative data based on the Stack Overflow collection is available online
A derivational rephrasing experiment for question answering
In Knowledge Management, variations in information expressions have proven a
real challenge. In particular, classical semantic relations (e.g. synonymy) do
not connect words with different parts-of-speech. The method proposed tries to
address this issue. It consists in building a derivational resource from a
morphological derivation tool together with derivational guidelines from a
dictionary in order to store only correct derivatives. This resource, combined
with a syntactic parser, a semantic disambiguator and some derivational
patterns, helps to reformulate an original sentence while keeping the initial
meaning in a convincing manner This approach has been evaluated in three
different ways: the precision of the derivatives produced from a lemma; its
ability to provide well-formed reformulations from an original sentence,
preserving the initial meaning; its impact on the results coping with a real
issue, ie a question answering task . The evaluation of this approach through a
question answering system shows the pros and cons of this system, while
foreshadowing some interesting future developments
Characterizing Question Facets for Complex Answer Retrieval
Complex answer retrieval (CAR) is the process of retrieving answers to
questions that have multifaceted or nuanced answers. In this work, we present
two novel approaches for CAR based on the observation that question facets can
vary in utility: from structural (facets that can apply to many similar topics,
such as 'History') to topical (facets that are specific to the question's
topic, such as the 'Westward expansion' of the United States). We first explore
a way to incorporate facet utility into ranking models during query term score
combination. We then explore a general approach to reform the structure of
ranking models to aid in learning of facet utility in the query-document term
matching phase. When we use our techniques with a leading neural ranker on the
TREC CAR dataset, our methods rank first in the 2017 TREC CAR benchmark, and
yield up to 26% higher performance than the next best method.Comment: 4 pages; SIGIR 2018 Short Pape
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