Identifying relationships between entities in text for complex interactive question answering task

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Using ontology in query answering systems: Scenarios, requirements and challenges

Equipped with the ultimate query answering system, computers would finally be in a position to address all our information needs in a natural way. In this paper, we describe how Language and Computing nv (L&C), a developer of ontology-based natural language understanding systems for the healthcare domain, is working towards the ultimate Question Answering (QA) System for healthcare workers. L&C’s company strategy in this area is to design in a step-by-step fashion the essential components of such a system, each component being designed to solve some one part of the total problem and at the same time reflect well-defined needs on the prat of our customers. We compare our strategy with the research roadmap proposed by the Question Answering Committee of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), paying special attention to the role of ontology

Research on speech understanding and related areas at SRI

Research capabilities on speech understanding, speech recognition, and voice control are described. Research activities and the activities which involve text input rather than speech are discussed

Answering Complex Questions by Joining Multi-Document Evidence with Quasi Knowledge Graphs

Direct answering of questions that involve multiple entities and relations is a challenge for text-based QA. This problem is most pronounced when answers can be found only by joining evidence from multiple documents. Curated knowledge graphs (KGs) may yield good answers, but are limited by their inherent incompleteness and potential staleness. This paper presents QUEST, a method that can answer complex questions directly from textual sources on-the-fly, by computing similarity joins over partial results from different documents. Our method is completely unsupervised, avoiding training-data bottlenecks and being able to cope with rapidly evolving ad hoc topics and formulation style in user questions. QUEST builds a noisy quasi KG with node and edge weights, consisting of dynamically retrieved entity names and relational phrases. It augments this graph with types and semantic alignments, and computes the best answers by an algorithm for Group Steiner Trees. We evaluate QUEST on benchmarks of complex questions, and show that it substantially outperforms state-of-the-art baselines

Text Analytics: the convergence of Big Data and Artificial Intelligence

The analysis of the text content in emails, blogs, tweets, forums and other forms of textual communication constitutes what we call text analytics. Text analytics is applicable to most industries: it can help analyze millions of emails; you can analyze customers’ comments and questions in forums; you can perform sentiment analysis using text analytics by measuring positive or negative perceptions of a company, brand, or product. Text Analytics has also been called text mining, and is a subcategory of the Natural Language Processing (NLP) field, which is one of the founding branches of Artificial Intelligence, back in the 1950s, when an interest in understanding text originally developed. Currently Text Analytics is often considered as the next step in Big Data analysis. Text Analytics has a number of subdivisions: Information Extraction, Named Entity Recognition, Semantic Web annotated domain’s representation, and many more. Several techniques are currently used and some of them have gained a lot of attention, such as Machine Learning, to show a semisupervised enhancement of systems, but they also present a number of limitations which make them not always the only or the best choice. We conclude with current and near future applications of Text Analytics