Answer Sequence Learning with Neural Networks for Answer Selection in Community Question Answering

In this paper, the answer selection problem in community question answering (CQA) is regarded as an answer sequence labeling task, and a novel approach is proposed based on the recurrent architecture for this problem. Our approach applies convolution neural networks (CNNs) to learning the joint representation of question-answer pair firstly, and then uses the joint representation as input of the long short-term memory (LSTM) to learn the answer sequence of a question for labeling the matching quality of each answer. Experiments conducted on the SemEval 2015 CQA dataset shows the effectiveness of our approach.Comment: 6 page

Mining question-answer pairs from web forum: a survey of challenges and resolutions

Internet forums, which are also known as discussion boards, are popular web applications. Members of the board discuss issues and share ideas to form a community within the board, and as a result generate huge amount of content on different topics on daily basis. Interest in information extraction and knowledge discovery from such sources has been on the increase in the research community. A number of factors are limiting the potentiality of mining knowledge from forums. Lexical chasm or lexical gap that renders some Natural Language Processing techniques (NLP) less effective, Informal tone that creates noisy data, drifting of discussion topic that prevents focused mining and asynchronous issue that makes it difficult to establish post-reply relationship are some of the problems that need to be addressed. This survey introduces these challenges within the framework of question answering. The survey provides description of the problems; cites and explores useful publications to the reader for further examination; provides an overview of resolution strategies and findings relevant to the challenges

Feature analysis for web forum question post detection

A web forum which is also known as discussion board or Internet forum is an online community of users with a common interest. It is a problem-solving platform that engages experts across the globe. Both technical and non-technical problems are resolved on a daily basis within web forums. Research activities in this domain have been concentrated on answer detection with the assumption that the initial post of a thread is a question post. The quality of web forum question posts varies from excellent to mediocre or even spam. Detecting good question posts require utilization of salient features. In this paper, we implement a bag-of-words (BoW) model to mine web forum question posts. We empirically address the following questions in the paper. Can BoW model effectively detect web forum question post? What feature selection method is most appropriate for BoW model in this domain? Is choice of classifier influenced by web forum genre? We used three publicly available datasets of varying technical degrees for the experiments. The experimental results revealed that BoW can perform better than complex techniques that implement higher N-gram with part-of-speech tagging

Enhanced lexicon based models for extracting question-answer pairs from web forum

A Web forum is an online community that brings people in different geographical locations together. Members of the forum exchange ideas and expertise. As a result, a huge amount of contents on different topics are generated on a daily basis. The huge human generated contents of web forum can be mined as questionanswer pairs (Q&A). One of the major challenges in mining Q&A from web forum is to establish a good relationship between the question and the candidate answers. This problem is compounded by the noisy nature of web forum's human generated contents. Unfortunately, the existing methods that are used to mine knowledge from web forums ignore the effect of noise on the mining tools, making the lexical contents less effective. This study proposes lexicon based models that can automatically mine question-answer pairs with higher accuracy scores from web forum. The first phase of the research produces question mining model. It was implemented using features generated from unigram, bigram, forum metadata and simple rules. These features were screened using both chi-square and wrapper techniques. Wrapper generated features were used by Multinomial Naïve Bayes to finally build the model. The second phase produced a normalized lexical model for answer mining. It was implemented using 13 lexical features that cut across four quality dimensions. The performance of the features was enhanced by noise normalization, a process that fixed orthographic, phonetic and acronyms noises. The third phase of the research produced a hybridized model of lexical and non-lexical features. The average performances of the question mining model, normalized lexical model and hybridized model for answer mining were 90.3%, 97.5%, and 99.5% respectively on three data sets used. They outperformed all previous works in the domain. The first major contribution of the study is the development of an improved question mining model that is characterized by higher accuracy, better specificity, less complex and ability to generate good accuracy across different forum genres. The second contribution is the development of normalized lexical based model that has capability to establish good relationship between a question and its corresponding answer. The third contribution is the development of a hybridized model that integrates lexical features that guarantee relevance with non-lexical that guarantee quality to mine web forum answers. The fourth contribution is a novel integration of question and answer mining models to automatically generate question-answer pairs from web forum

Development of a Corpus for User­based Scientific Question Answering

Tese de mestrado, Bioinformática e Biologia Computacional, Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências, 2021In recent years Question & Answering (QA) tasks became particularly relevant in the research field of natural language understanding. However, the lack of good quality datasets has been an important limiting factor in the quest for better models. Particularly in the biomedical domain, the scarcity of gold standard labelled datasets has been a recognized obstacle given its idiosyncrasies and complexities often require the participation of skilled domain¬specific experts in producing such datasets. To address this issue, a method for automatically gather Question¬Answer pairs from online QA biomedical forums has been suggested yielding a corpus named BiQA. The authors describe several strategies to validate this new dataset but a human manual verification has not been conducted. With this in mind, this dissertation was set out with the objectives of performing a manual verification of a sample of 1200 questions of BiQA and also to expanding these questions, by adding features, into a new corpus of text ¬ BiQA2 ¬ with the goal of contributing with a new corpusfor biomedical QA research. Regarding the manual verification of BiQA, a methodology for its characterization was laid out and allowed the identification of an array of potential problems related to the nature of its questions and answers aptness for which possible improvement solutions were presented. Concomitantly, the proposed new BiQA2 corpus ¬ created upon the validated questions and answers from the perused samples from BiQA ¬ builds new features similar to those observed in other biomedical corpus such as the BioASQ dataset. Both BiQA and BiQA2 were applied to deep learning strategies previously submitted to the BioASQ competition to assess their performance as a source of training data. Although the results achieved with the models created using BiQA2 exhibit limited capability pertaining to the BioASQ challenge, they also show some potential to contribute positively to model training in tasks such as Document re-ranking and answering to ‘yes/no’ questions

Huatuo-26M, a Large-scale Chinese Medical QA Dataset

In this paper, we release a largest ever medical Question Answering (QA) dataset with 26 million QA pairs. We benchmark many existing approaches in our dataset in terms of both retrieval and generation. Experimental results show that the existing models perform far lower than expected and the released dataset is still challenging in the pre-trained language model era. Moreover, we also experimentally show the benefit of the proposed dataset in many aspects: (i) trained models for other QA datasets in a zero-shot fashion; and (ii) as external knowledge for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG); and (iii) improving existing pre-trained language models by using the QA pairs as a pre-training corpus in continued training manner. We believe that this dataset will not only contribute to medical research but also facilitate both the patients and clinical doctors. See \url{https://github.com/FreedomIntelligence/Huatuo-26M}