32,841 research outputs found
The State-of-the-arts in Focused Search
The continuous influx of various text data on the Web requires search engines to improve their retrieval abilities for more specific information. The need for relevant results to a userās topic of interest has gone beyond search for domain or type specific documents to more focused result (e.g. document fragments or answers to a query). The introduction of XML provides a format standard for data representation, storage, and exchange. It helps focused search to be carried out at different granularities of a structured document with XML markups. This report aims at reviewing the state-of-the-arts in focused search, particularly techniques for topic-specific document retrieval, passage retrieval, XML retrieval, and entity ranking. It is concluded with highlight of open problems
Look before you Hop: Conversational Question Answering over Knowledge Graphs Using Judicious Context Expansion
Fact-centric information needs are rarely one-shot; users typically ask follow-up questions to explore a topic. In such a conversational setting, the user's inputs are often incomplete, with entities or predicates left out, and ungrammatical phrases. This poses a huge challenge to question answering (QA) systems that typically rely on cues in full-fledged interrogative sentences. As a solution, we develop CONVEX: an unsupervised method that can answer incomplete questions over a knowledge graph (KG) by maintaining conversation context using entities and predicates seen so far and automatically inferring missing or ambiguous pieces for follow-up questions. The core of our method is a graph exploration algorithm that judiciously expands a frontier to find candidate answers for the current question. To evaluate CONVEX, we release ConvQuestions, a crowdsourced benchmark with 11,200 distinct conversations from five different domains. We show that CONVEX: (i) adds conversational support to any stand-alone QA system, and (ii) outperforms state-of-the-art baselines and question completion strategies
A Deep Relevance Matching Model for Ad-hoc Retrieval
In recent years, deep neural networks have led to exciting breakthroughs in
speech recognition, computer vision, and natural language processing (NLP)
tasks. However, there have been few positive results of deep models on ad-hoc
retrieval tasks. This is partially due to the fact that many important
characteristics of the ad-hoc retrieval task have not been well addressed in
deep models yet. Typically, the ad-hoc retrieval task is formalized as a
matching problem between two pieces of text in existing work using deep models,
and treated equivalent to many NLP tasks such as paraphrase identification,
question answering and automatic conversation. However, we argue that the
ad-hoc retrieval task is mainly about relevance matching while most NLP
matching tasks concern semantic matching, and there are some fundamental
differences between these two matching tasks. Successful relevance matching
requires proper handling of the exact matching signals, query term importance,
and diverse matching requirements. In this paper, we propose a novel deep
relevance matching model (DRMM) for ad-hoc retrieval. Specifically, our model
employs a joint deep architecture at the query term level for relevance
matching. By using matching histogram mapping, a feed forward matching network,
and a term gating network, we can effectively deal with the three relevance
matching factors mentioned above. Experimental results on two representative
benchmark collections show that our model can significantly outperform some
well-known retrieval models as well as state-of-the-art deep matching models.Comment: CIKM 2016, long pape
Answering Complex Questions by Joining Multi-Document Evidence with Quasi Knowledge Graphs
Direct answering of questions that involve multiple entities and relations is a challenge for text-based QA. This problem is most pronounced when answers can be found only by joining evidence from multiple documents. Curated knowledge graphs (KGs) may yield good answers, but are limited by their inherent incompleteness and potential staleness. This paper presents QUEST, a method that can answer complex questions directly from textual sources on-the-fly, by computing similarity joins over partial results from different documents. Our method is completely unsupervised, avoiding training-data bottlenecks and being able to cope with rapidly evolving ad hoc topics and formulation style in user questions. QUEST builds a noisy quasi KG with node and edge weights, consisting of dynamically retrieved entity names and relational phrases. It augments this graph with types and semantic alignments, and computes the best answers by an algorithm for Group Steiner Trees. We evaluate QUEST on benchmarks of complex questions, and show that it substantially outperforms state-of-the-art baselines
Quick and (not so) Dirty: Unsupervised Selection of Justification Sentences for Multi-hop Question Answering
We propose an unsupervised strategy for the selection of justification
sentences for multi-hop question answering (QA) that (a) maximizes the
relevance of the selected sentences, (b) minimizes the overlap between the
selected facts, and (c) maximizes the coverage of both question and answer.
This unsupervised sentence selection method can be coupled with any supervised
QA approach. We show that the sentences selected by our method improve the
performance of a state-of-the-art supervised QA model on two multi-hop QA
datasets: AI2's Reasoning Challenge (ARC) and Multi-Sentence Reading
Comprehension (MultiRC). We obtain new state-of-the-art performance on both
datasets among approaches that do not use external resources for training the
QA system: 56.82% F1 on ARC (41.24% on Challenge and 64.49% on Easy) and 26.1%
EM0 on MultiRC. Our justification sentences have higher quality than the
justifications selected by a strong information retrieval baseline, e.g., by
5.4% F1 in MultiRC. We also show that our unsupervised selection of
justification sentences is more stable across domains than a state-of-the-art
supervised sentence selection method.Comment: Published at EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019 as long conference paper. Corrected
the name reference for Speer et.al, 201
- ā¦