Where was COVID-19 first discovered? Designing a question-answering system for pandemic situations

The COVID-19 pandemic is accompanied by a massive “infodemic” that makes it hard to identify concise and credible information for COVID-19-related questions, like incubation time, infection rates, or the effectiveness of vaccines. As a novel solution, our paper is concerned with designing a question-answering system based on modern technologies from natural language processing to overcome information overload and misinformation in pandemic situations. To carry out our research, we followed a design science research approach and applied Ingwersen’s cognitive model of information retrieval interaction to inform our design process from a socio-technical lens. On this basis, we derived prescriptive design knowledge in terms of design requirements and design principles, which we translated into the construction of a prototypical instantiation. Our implementation is based on the comprehensive CORD-19 dataset, and we demonstrate our artifact’s usefulness by evaluating its answer quality based on a sample of COVID-19 questions labeled by biomedical experts

FACTORS INFLUENCING USER’S CONTINUANCE INTENTION ON PAID QUESTION AND ANSWER SERVICE ----A STUDY ON WEIBO IN CHINA

This thesis addresses the research question “Why do users continue to use paid Q&A in China” by means showed below: First, this research introduces research background of paid Q&A in China and raises corresponding research question and highlights the research significance of this thesis topic; Second, the author concludes previous research on paid Q&A in aspects of Q&A system, paid subscription and sharing economy, and finds that most of prior research focuses on exploring the influence of usefulness but not enjoyment on the users’ willingness of continuing using a paid Q&A system; Third, the thesis introduces the VAM theory and build a modified model based on it, this modified model highlights the importance of pleasure on users’ continuance intention in using paid Q&A; Finally, the empirical study combining an Exploratory Factor Analysis and a Confirmatory Factor Analysis proves that, after integrating factors extracted from previous research and the proposed model, the research is tested to be explanatorily capable and hypotheses related to the model are mostly proved to be supported. As a conclusion, this study conducts an investigation on the constructs and related theories that influence users’ continuance intention to use paid Q&A, from a hedonic perspective. In this thesis, VAM theory is selected as the prototype of proposed research model which reveals factors affecting users’ continuance intention to use a Chinese paid Q&A product named Weibo Paid Q&A. In this thesis, the proposed model makes predictions that the constructs perceived fee and community atmosphere along with perceived enjoyment construct have critical effect on users’ continuance willingness in using Weibo Paid Q&A in China. With the assistance of PLS–SEM, this study analyzes data collected from users in WPQA, the empirical study verifies that users' continuance intention is assuredly dependent on perceived fee and community atmosphere along with perceived enjoyment. The study also reveals that quality of answerers and quality of answer positively exert significant influences on perceived enjoyment

Ontology-based approach to semantically enhanced question answering for closed domain: a review

Abstract: For many users of natural language processing (NLP), it can be challenging to obtain concise, accurate and precise answers to a question. Systems such as question answering (QA) enable users to ask questions and receive feedback in the form of quick answers to questions posed in natural language, rather than in the form of lists of documents delivered by search engines. This task is challenging and involves complex semantic annotation and knowledge representation. This study reviews the literature detailing ontology-based methods that semantically enhance QA for a closed domain, by presenting a literature review of the relevant studies published between 2000 and 2020. The review reports that 83 of the 124 papers considered acknowledge the QA approach, and recommend its development and evaluation using different methods. These methods are evaluated according to accuracy, precision, and recall. An ontological approach to semantically enhancing QA is found to be adopted in a limited way, as many of the studies reviewed concentrated instead on NLP and information retrieval (IR) processing. While the majority of the studies reviewed focus on open domains, this study investigates the closed domain