Proceedings ICPW'07: 2nd International Conference on the Pragmatic Web, 22-23 Oct. 2007, Tilburg: NL

Proceedings ICPW'07: 2nd International Conference on the Pragmatic Web, 22-23 Oct. 2007, Tilburg: N

Follow-up question handling in the IMIX and Ritel systems: A comparative study

One of the basic topics of question answering (QA) dialogue systems is how follow-up questions should be interpreted by a QA system. In this paper, we shall discuss our experience with the IMIX and Ritel systems, for both of which a follow-up question handling scheme has been developed, and corpora have been collected. These two systems are each other's opposites in many respects: IMIX is multimodal, non-factoid, black-box QA, while Ritel is speech, factoid, keyword-based QA. Nevertheless, we will show that they are quite comparable, and that it is fruitful to examine the similarities and differences. We shall look at how the systems are composed, and how real, non-expert, users interact with the systems. We shall also provide comparisons with systems from the literature where possible, and indicate where open issues lie and in what areas existing systems may be improved. We conclude that most systems have a common architecture with a set of common subtasks, in particular detecting follow-up questions and finding referents for them. We characterise these tasks using the typical techniques used for performing them, and data from our corpora. We also identify a special type of follow-up question, the discourse question, which is asked when the user is trying to understand an answer, and propose some basic methods for handling it

Proceedings of QG2010: The Third Workshop on Question Generation

These are the peer-reviewed proceedings of "QG2010, The Third Workshop on Question Generation". The workshop included a special track for "QGSTEC2010: The First Question Generation Shared Task and Evaluation Challenge". QG2010 was held as part of The Tenth International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS2010)

A Survey on Conversational Search and Applications in Biomedicine

This paper aims to provide a radical rundown on Conversation Search (ConvSearch), an approach to enhance the information retrieval method where users engage in a dialogue for the information-seeking tasks. In this survey, we predominantly focused on the human interactive characteristics of the ConvSearch systems, highlighting the operations of the action modules, likely the Retrieval system, Question-Answering, and Recommender system. We labeled various ConvSearch research problems in knowledge bases, natural language processing, and dialogue management systems along with the action modules. We further categorized the framework to ConvSearch and the application is directed toward biomedical and healthcare fields for the utilization of clinical social technology. Finally, we conclude by talking through the challenges and issues of ConvSearch, particularly in Bio-Medicine. Our main aim is to provide an integrated and unified vision of the ConvSearch components from different fields, which benefit the information-seeking process in healthcare systems

Deriving query suggestions for site search

Modern search engines have been moving away from simplistic interfaces that aimed at satisfying a user's need with a single-shot query. Interactive features are now integral parts of web search engines. However, generating good query modification suggestions remains a challenging issue. Query log analysis is one of the major strands of work in this direction. Although much research has been performed on query logs collected on the web as a whole, query log analysis to enhance search on smaller and more focused collections has attracted less attention, despite its increasing practical importance. In this article, we report on a systematic study of different query modification methods applied to a substantial query log collected on a local website that already uses an interactive search engine. We conducted experiments in which we asked users to assess the relevance of potential query modification suggestions that have been constructed using a range of log analysis methods and different baseline approaches. The experimental results demonstrate the usefulness of log analysis to extract query modification suggestions. Furthermore, our experiments demonstrate that a more fine-grained approach than grouping search requests into sessions allows for extraction of better refinement terms from query log files. © 2013 ASIS&T

Database technology and the management of multimedia data in Mirror

Multimedia digital libraries require an open distributed architecture instead of a monolithic database system. In the Mirror project, we use the Monet extensible database kernel to manage different representations of multimedia objects. To maintain independence between content, meta-data, and the creation of meta-data, we allow distribution of data and operations using CORBA. This open architecture introduces new problems for data access. From an end user’s perspective, the problem is how to search the available representations to fulfill an actual information need; the conceptual gap between human perceptual processes and the meta-data is too large. From a system’s perspective, several representations of the data may semantically overlap or be irrelevant. We address these problems with an iterative query process and active user participation through relevance feedback. A retrieval model based on inference networks assists the user with query formulation. The integration of this model into the database design has two advantages. First, the user can query both the logical and the content structure of multimedia objects. Second, the use of different data models in the logical and the physical database design provides data independence and allows algebraic query optimization. We illustrate query processing with a music retrieval application