763 research outputs found
Full machine translation for factoid question answering
In this paper we present an SMT-based approach to Question Answering (QA). QA is the task of extracting exact answers in
response to natural language questions. In
our approach, the answer is a translation of
the question obtained with an SMT system.
We use the n-best translations of a given
question to find similar sentences in the
document collection that contain the real
answer. Although it is not the first time that SMT inspires a QA system, it is the first approach that uses a full Machine Translation system for generating answers. Our approach is validated with the datasets of the TREC QA evaluation.Peer ReviewedPreprin
An analysis of machine translation errors on the effectiveness of an Arabic-English QA system
The aim of this paper is to investigate
how much the effectiveness of a Question
Answering (QA) system was affected
by the performance of Machine
Translation (MT) based question translation.
Nearly 200 questions were selected
from TREC QA tracks and ran through a
question answering system. It was able to
answer 42.6% of the questions correctly
in a monolingual run. These questions
were then translated manually from English
into Arabic and back into English using
an MT system, and then re-applied to
the QA system. The system was able to
answer 10.2% of the translated questions.
An analysis of what sort of translation error
affected which questions was conducted,
concluding that factoid type
questions are less prone to translation error
than others
The effects of topic familiarity on user search behavior in question answering systems
This paper reports on experiments that attempt
to characterize the relationship between users
and their knowledge of the search topic in a
Question Answering (QA) system. It also
investigates user search behavior with respect
to the length of answers presented by a QA
system. Two lengths of answers were
compared; snippets (one to two sentences of
text) and exact answers. A user test was
conducted, 92 factoid questions were judged
by 44 participants, to explore the participantsâ
preferences, feelings and opinions about QA
system tasks. The conclusions drawn from the
results were that participants preferred and
obtained higher accuracy in finding answers
from the snippets set. However, accuracy
varied according to usersâ topic familiarity;
users were only substantially helped by the
wider context of a snippet if they were already
familiar with the topic of the question, without
such familiarity, users were about as accurate
at locating answers from the snippets as they
were in exact set
Dublin City University at QA@CLEF 2008
We describe our participation in Multilingual Question Answering at CLEF 2008 using German and English as our source and target languages respectively. The system was built using UIMA (Unstructured Information Management Architecture) as underlying framework
A hybrid filtering approach for question answering
We describe a question answering system that took part in the bilingual CLEFQA task
(German-English) where German is the source language and English the target language.We
used the BableFish online translation system to translate the German questions into English.
The system is targeted at Factoid and Denition questions. Our focus in designing the
current system is on testing our online methods which are based on information extraction
and linguistic ltering methods. Our system does not make use of precompiled tables or
Gazetteers but uses Web snippets to rerank candidate answers extracted from the document
collections. WordNet is also used as a lexical resource in the system.
Our question answering system consists of the following core components: Question Anal-
ysis, Passage Retrieval, Sentence Analysis and Answer Selection. These components employ
various Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML) tools, a set of
heuristics and dierent lexical resources. Seamless integration of the various components is
one of the major challenges of QA system development. In order to facilitate our develop-
ment process, we used the Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA) as
our underlying framework
Reading Wikipedia to Answer Open-Domain Questions
This paper proposes to tackle open- domain question answering using Wikipedia
as the unique knowledge source: the answer to any factoid question is a text
span in a Wikipedia article. This task of machine reading at scale combines the
challenges of document retrieval (finding the relevant articles) with that of
machine comprehension of text (identifying the answer spans from those
articles). Our approach combines a search component based on bigram hashing and
TF-IDF matching with a multi-layer recurrent neural network model trained to
detect answers in Wikipedia paragraphs. Our experiments on multiple existing QA
datasets indicate that (1) both modules are highly competitive with respect to
existing counterparts and (2) multitask learning using distant supervision on
their combination is an effective complete system on this challenging task.Comment: ACL2017, 10 page
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