Deriving disambiguous queries in a spoken interactive ODQA system

Recently, Open-Domain Question Answering (ODQA) systems that can extract an exact answer from large text corpora based on text input are intensively being investigated. However, information in the first question input by a user is not usually enough to yield the answer desired. Interactions for collecting additional information to accomplish QA is needed. In order to construct more exact and convenient ODQA systems, this paper proposes an interaction approach for spoken interactive ODQA systems. With low reliabilities of answer hypotheses obtained by an ODQA system, the system automatically derives Disambiguous Queries (DQs) that draw out additional information. The additional information based on the DQs should contribute to distinguishing effectively an exact answer and supplementing lacking information by recognition errors. In our spoken interactive ODQA system, SPIQA, spoken questions are recognized by an ASR system and DQs are automatically generated to disambiguate the transcribed questions. The appropriateness of the derived DQs has been confirmed by comparison with manually determined ones. 1