581 research outputs found
Hi, how can I help you?: Automating enterprise IT support help desks
Question answering is one of the primary challenges of natural language
understanding. In realizing such a system, providing complex long answers to
questions is a challenging task as opposed to factoid answering as the former
needs context disambiguation. The different methods explored in the literature
can be broadly classified into three categories namely: 1) classification
based, 2) knowledge graph based and 3) retrieval based. Individually, none of
them address the need of an enterprise wide assistance system for an IT support
and maintenance domain. In this domain the variance of answers is large ranging
from factoid to structured operating procedures; the knowledge is present
across heterogeneous data sources like application specific documentation,
ticket management systems and any single technique for a general purpose
assistance is unable to scale for such a landscape. To address this, we have
built a cognitive platform with capabilities adopted for this domain. Further,
we have built a general purpose question answering system leveraging the
platform that can be instantiated for multiple products, technologies in the
support domain. The system uses a novel hybrid answering model that
orchestrates across a deep learning classifier, a knowledge graph based context
disambiguation module and a sophisticated bag-of-words search system. This
orchestration performs context switching for a provided question and also does
a smooth hand-off of the question to a human expert if none of the automated
techniques can provide a confident answer. This system has been deployed across
675 internal enterprise IT support and maintenance projects.Comment: To appear in IAAI 201
Training Curricula for Open Domain Answer Re-Ranking
In precision-oriented tasks like answer ranking, it is more important to rank
many relevant answers highly than to retrieve all relevant answers. It follows
that a good ranking strategy would be to learn how to identify the easiest
correct answers first (i.e., assign a high ranking score to answers that have
characteristics that usually indicate relevance, and a low ranking score to
those with characteristics that do not), before incorporating more complex
logic to handle difficult cases (e.g., semantic matching or reasoning). In this
work, we apply this idea to the training of neural answer rankers using
curriculum learning. We propose several heuristics to estimate the difficulty
of a given training sample. We show that the proposed heuristics can be used to
build a training curriculum that down-weights difficult samples early in the
training process. As the training process progresses, our approach gradually
shifts to weighting all samples equally, regardless of difficulty. We present a
comprehensive evaluation of our proposed idea on three answer ranking datasets.
Results show that our approach leads to superior performance of two leading
neural ranking architectures, namely BERT and ConvKNRM, using both pointwise
and pairwise losses. When applied to a BERT-based ranker, our method yields up
to a 4% improvement in MRR and a 9% improvement in P@1 (compared to the model
trained without a curriculum). This results in models that can achieve
comparable performance to more expensive state-of-the-art techniques.Comment: Accepted at SIGIR 2020 (long
Naive Bayes Classification in The Question and Answering System
Abstract—Question and answering (QA) system is a system to answer question based on collections of unstructured text or in the form of human language. In general, QA system consists of four stages, i.e. question analysis, documents selection, passage retrieval and answer extraction. In this study we added two processes i.e. classifying documents and classifying passage. We use Naïve Bayes for classification, Dynamic Passage Partitioning for finding answer and Lucene for document selection. The experiment was done using 100 questions from 3000 documents related to the disease and the results were compared with a system that does not use the classification process. From the test results, the system works best with the use of 10 of the most relevant documents, 5 passage with the highest score and 10 answer the closest distance. Mean Reciprocal Rank (MMR) value for QA system with classification is 0.41960 which is 4.9% better than MRR value for QA system without classificatio
Factoid question answering for spoken documents
In this dissertation, we present a factoid question answering system, specifically tailored for Question Answering (QA) on spoken documents.
This work explores, for the first time, which techniques can be robustly adapted from the usual QA on written documents to the more difficult spoken documents scenario. More specifically, we study new information retrieval (IR) techniques designed for speech, and utilize several levels of linguistic information for the speech-based QA task. These include named-entity detection with phonetic information, syntactic parsing applied to speech transcripts, and the use of coreference resolution.
Our approach is largely based on supervised machine learning techniques, with special focus on the answer extraction step, and makes little use of handcrafted knowledge. Consequently, it should be easily adaptable to other domains and languages.
In the work resulting of this Thesis, we have impulsed and coordinated the creation of an evaluation framework for the task of QA on spoken documents. The framework, named QAst, provides multi-lingual corpora, evaluation questions, and answers key. These corpora have been used in the QAst evaluation that was held in the CLEF workshop for the years 2007, 2008 and 2009, thus helping the developing of state-of-the-art techniques for this particular topic.
The presentend QA system and all its modules are extensively evaluated on the European Parliament Plenary Sessions
English corpus composed of manual transcripts and automatic transcripts obtained by three different Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems that exhibit significantly different word error rates. This data belongs to the CLEF 2009 track for QA on speech transcripts.
The main results confirm that syntactic information is very useful for learning to rank question candidates, improving results on both manual and automatic transcripts unless the ASR quality is very low. Overall, the performance of our system is comparable or better than the state-of-the-art on this corpus, confirming the validity of our approach.En aquesta Tesi, presentem un sistema de Question Answering (QA) factual, especialment ajustat per treballar amb documents orals.
En el desenvolupament explorem, per primera vegada, quines tècniques de les habitualment emprades en QA per documents escrit són suficientment robustes per funcionar en l'escenari més difÃcil de documents orals. Amb més especificitat, estudiem nous mètodes de Information Retrieval (IR) dissenyats per tractar amb la veu, i utilitzem diversos nivells d'informació linqüÃstica. Entre aquests s'inclouen, a saber: detecció de Named Entities utilitzant informació fonètica, "parsing" sintà ctic aplicat a transcripcions de veu, i també l'ús d'un sub-sistema de detecció i resolució de la correferència.
La nostra aproximació al problema es recolza en gran part en tècniques supervisades de Machine Learning, estant aquestes enfocades especialment cap a la part d'extracció de la resposta, i fa servir la menor quantitat possible de coneixement creat per humans. En conseqüència, tot el procés de QA pot ser adaptat a altres dominis o altres llengües amb relativa facilitat.
Un dels resultats addicionals de la feina darrere d'aquesta Tesis ha estat que hem impulsat i coordinat la creació d'un marc d'avaluació de la taska de QA en documents orals. Aquest marc de treball, anomenat QAst (Question Answering on Speech Transcripts), proporciona un corpus de documents orals multi-lingüe, uns conjunts de preguntes d'avaluació, i les respostes correctes d'aquestes. Aquestes dades han estat utilitzades en les evaluacionis QAst que han tingut lloc en el si de les conferències CLEF en els anys 2007, 2008 i 2009; d'aquesta manera s'ha promogut i ajudat a la creació d'un estat-de-l'art de tècniques adreçades a aquest problema en particular.
El sistema de QA que presentem i tots els seus particulars sumbòduls, han estat avaluats extensivament utilitzant el corpus EPPS (transcripcions de les Sessions Plenaries del Parlament Europeu) en anglès, que cónté transcripcions manuals de tots els discursos i també transcripcions automà tiques obtingudes mitjançant tres reconeixedors automà tics de la parla (ASR) diferents. Els reconeixedors tenen caracterÃstiques i resultats diferents que permetes una avaluació quantitativa i qualitativa de la tasca. Aquestes dades pertanyen a l'avaluació QAst del 2009.
Els resultats principals de la nostra feina confirmen que la informació sintà ctica és mol útil per aprendre automà ticament a valorar la plausibilitat de les respostes candidates, millorant els resultats previs tan en transcripcions manuals com transcripcions automà tiques, descomptat que la qualitat de l'ASR sigui molt baixa. En general, el rendiment del nostre sistema és comparable o millor que els altres sistemes pertanyents a l'estat-del'art, confirmant aixà la validesa de la nostra aproximació
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