38,550 research outputs found
Utilizing sub-topical structure of documents for information retrieval.
Text segmentation in natural language processing typically refers to the process of decomposing a document into constituent subtopics. Our work centers on the application of text segmentation techniques within information retrieval (IR) tasks. For example, for scoring a document by combining the retrieval scores of its constituent segments, exploiting the proximity of query terms in documents for ad-hoc search, and for question answering (QA), where retrieved passages from multiple documents are aggregated and presented as a single document to a searcher. Feedback in ad hoc IR task is shown to benefit from the use of extracted sentences instead of terms from the pseudo relevant documents for query expansion. Retrieval effectiveness for patent prior art search task is enhanced by applying text segmentation to the patent queries. Another aspect of our work involves augmenting text segmentation techniques to produce segments which are more readable with less unresolved anaphora. This is particularly useful for QA and snippet generation tasks where the objective is to aggregate relevant and novel information from multiple documents satisfying user information need on one hand, and ensuring that the automatically generated content presented to the user is easily readable without reference to the original source document
Making Neural QA as Simple as Possible but not Simpler
Recent development of large-scale question answering (QA) datasets triggered
a substantial amount of research into end-to-end neural architectures for QA.
Increasingly complex systems have been conceived without comparison to simpler
neural baseline systems that would justify their complexity. In this work, we
propose a simple heuristic that guides the development of neural baseline
systems for the extractive QA task. We find that there are two ingredients
necessary for building a high-performing neural QA system: first, the awareness
of question words while processing the context and second, a composition
function that goes beyond simple bag-of-words modeling, such as recurrent
neural networks. Our results show that FastQA, a system that meets these two
requirements, can achieve very competitive performance compared with existing
models. We argue that this surprising finding puts results of previous systems
and the complexity of recent QA datasets into perspective
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
Retrieving descriptive phrases from large amounts of free text
This paper presents a system that retrieves descriptive phrases of proper nouns from free text. Sentences holding the specified noun are ranked using a technique based on pattern matching, word counting, and sentence location. No domain specific knowledge is used. Experiments show the system able to rank highly those sentences that contain phrases describing or defining the query noun. In contrast to existing methods, this system does not use parsing techniques but still achieves high levels of accuracy. From the results of a large-scale experiment, it is speculated that the success of this simpler method is due to the high quantities of free text being searched. Parallels between this work and recent findings in the very large corpus track of TREC are drawn
How to Evaluate your Question Answering System Every Day and Still Get Real Work Done
In this paper, we report on Qaviar, an experimental automated evaluation
system for question answering applications. The goal of our research was to
find an automatically calculated measure that correlates well with human
judges' assessment of answer correctness in the context of question answering
tasks. Qaviar judges the response by computing recall against the stemmed
content words in the human-generated answer key. It counts the answer correct
if it exceeds agiven recall threshold. We determined that the answer
correctness predicted by Qaviar agreed with the human 93% to 95% of the time.
41 question-answering systems were ranked by both Qaviar and human assessors,
and these rankings correlated with a Kendall's Tau measure of 0.920, compared
to a correlation of 0.956 between human assessors on the same data.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, to appear in Proceedings of the Second
International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2000
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