33,928 research outputs found
A derivational rephrasing experiment for question answering
In Knowledge Management, variations in information expressions have proven a
real challenge. In particular, classical semantic relations (e.g. synonymy) do
not connect words with different parts-of-speech. The method proposed tries to
address this issue. It consists in building a derivational resource from a
morphological derivation tool together with derivational guidelines from a
dictionary in order to store only correct derivatives. This resource, combined
with a syntactic parser, a semantic disambiguator and some derivational
patterns, helps to reformulate an original sentence while keeping the initial
meaning in a convincing manner This approach has been evaluated in three
different ways: the precision of the derivatives produced from a lemma; its
ability to provide well-formed reformulations from an original sentence,
preserving the initial meaning; its impact on the results coping with a real
issue, ie a question answering task . The evaluation of this approach through a
question answering system shows the pros and cons of this system, while
foreshadowing some interesting future developments
Off the Beaten Path: Let's Replace Term-Based Retrieval with k-NN Search
Retrieval pipelines commonly rely on a term-based search to obtain candidate
records, which are subsequently re-ranked. Some candidates are missed by this
approach, e.g., due to a vocabulary mismatch. We address this issue by
replacing the term-based search with a generic k-NN retrieval algorithm, where
a similarity function can take into account subtle term associations. While an
exact brute-force k-NN search using this similarity function is slow, we
demonstrate that an approximate algorithm can be nearly two orders of magnitude
faster at the expense of only a small loss in accuracy. A retrieval pipeline
using an approximate k-NN search can be more effective and efficient than the
term-based pipeline. This opens up new possibilities for designing effective
retrieval pipelines. Our software (including data-generating code) and
derivative data based on the Stack Overflow collection is available online
Social Search with Missing Data: Which Ranking Algorithm?
Online social networking tools are extremely popular, but can miss potential discoveries latent in the social 'fabric'. Matchmaking services which can do naive profile matching with old database technology are too brittle in the absence of key data, and even modern ontological markup, though powerful, can be onerous at data-input time. In this paper, we present a system called BuddyFinder which can automatically identify buddies who can best match a user's search requirements specified in a term-based query, even in the absence of stored user-profiles. We deploy and compare five statistical measures, namely, our own CORDER, mutual information (MI), phi-squared, improved MI and Z score, and two TF/IDF based baseline methods to find online users who best match the search requirements based on 'inferred profiles' of these users in the form of scavenged web pages. These measures identify statistically significant relationships between online users and a term-based query. Our user evaluation on two groups of users shows that BuddyFinder can find users highly relevant to search queries, and that CORDER achieved the best average ranking correlations among all seven algorithms and improved the performance of both baseline methods
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