Finding Answers to Complex Questions

In this chapter, we motivate one potential type of future QA system that deals with questions more complex than simple factoid questions and which provides answers with their supporting context. Our approach is based on the issues we faced when developing and delivering a QA system to deal with real time questions in the domain of RLVs within the larger field of aerospace engineering. This particular domain, the actual users of the system, and the questions asked, all demanded a change in our question-answering strategy. First, the chapter will present background on the project that provided the context and a description of the system that was deployed. Next, the chapter analyzes the questions put to the system by the users and discusses the implications that this analysis and the user evaluation study had on our design of a QA system of the future

The NSF/NIH Effect: Surveying the Effect of Data Management Requirements on Faculty, Sponsored Programs, and Institutional Repositories

The scholarly communication landscape is rapidly changing and nowhere is this more evident than in the field of data management. Mandates by major funding agencies, further expanded by executive order and pending legislation in 2013, require many research grant applicants to provide data management plans for preserving and making their research data openly available. However, do faculty researchers have the requisite skill sets and are their institutions providing the necessary infrastructure to comply with these mandates? To answer these questions, three groups were surveyed in 2012: research and teaching faculty, sponsored programs office staff, and institutional repository librarians. Survey results indicate that while faculty desire to share their data, they often lack the skills to do this effectively. Similarly, while repository managers and sponsored programs offices often provide the necessary infrastructure and knowledge, these resources are not being promoted effectively to faculty. The study offers important insights about services academic libraries can provide to support faculty in their data management efforts: providing tools for sharing research data; assisting with describing, finding, or accessing research data; providing information on copyright and ownership issues associated with data sets; and assisting with writing data management plans

Unifying PIM Research: Fostering a Connection Between Descriptive PIM Studies and Prescriptive Outcomes General Terms

ABSTRACT Descriptive Personal Information Management (PIM) studies inform us about PIM behavior and their findings should guide the design and development of PIM tools to support the behavior under study. Unfortunately, judging from the literature, descriptive studies do not always provide useful recommendations and PIM tool research is often carried out separately. This paper discusses what appears to be a possible research dichotomy and ways to bring the research back together. Three solutions are suggested: 1) PIM workshops where both types of studies are presented and researchers meet should be important venues for dissemination of results, cross-fertilization between different research areas, and collaboration between researchers; 2) A bridging methodology to translate research findings explicitly into design criteria could bring research and practice closer together; and 3) A general PIM framework based on the three essential PIM activities (finding/refinding activities, keeping activities, and meta-level activities)

Question Answering: CNLP at the TREC-2002 Question Answering Track

This paper describes the retrieval experiments for the main task and list task of the TREC-2002 question-answering track. The question answering system described automatically finds answers to questions in a large document collection. The system uses a two-stage retrieval approach to answer finding based on matching of named entities, linguistic patterns, keywords, and the use of a new inference module. In answering a question, the system carries out a detailed query analysis that produces a logical query representation, an indication of the question focus, and answer clue words

Question Answering: CNLP at the TREC-10 Question Answering Track

This paper describes the retrieval experiments for the main task and list task of the TREC-10 question answering track. The question answering system described automatically finds answers to questions in a large document collection. The system uses a two-stage retrieval approach to answer finding based on matching of named entities, linguistic patterns, and keywords. In answering a question, the system carries out a detailed query analysis that produces a logical query representation, an indication of the question focus, and answer clue words

Question Answering: CNLP at the TREC-9 Question Answering Track

This paper describes a question answering system that automatically finds answers to questions in a large collection of documents. The prototype CNLP question answering system was developed for participation in the TREC-9 question answering track. The system uses a two-stage retrieval approach to answer finding based on keyword and named entity matching. Results indicate that the system ranks correct answers high (mostly rank 1), provided that an answer to the question was found. Performance figures and further analyses are included

Translation events in cross-language information retrieval: lexical ambiguity, lexical holes, vocabulary mismatch, and correct translations

Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) systems enable users to formulate queries in their native language to retrieve documents in foreign languages. Because queries and documents in CLIR do not necessarily share the same language, translation is needed before matching can take place. This translation step tends to cause a reduction in the retrieval performance of CLIR as compared to monolingual information retrieval. The prevailing CLIR approach and the focus of this study is query translation. The translation of queries is inherently difficult due to the lack of a one-to-one mapping of a lexical item and its meaning, which creates lexical ambiguity. This, and other translation problems, result in translation errors which impact CLIR performance. To understand the events occurring in cross-language retrieval query translation and the relation of these events to retrieval performance, the study explored the following research questions: 1) What kinds of translation events affect cross-language retrieval? 2) In what way does the presence of certain translation events in query translation affect retrieval performance? The study followed a two-phase multi-method approach. In phase one, a taxonomy of translation events was created through content analysis of queries and their translations in combination with an examination of the literature. In the second and final phase, a subset of the test queries was coded using the taxonomy resulting from phase one. These queries were then used in information retrieval experimentation to assess the impact of the translation events on retrieval performance

Translation Events in Dutch Cross-Language Information Retrieval

The paper describes an analysis of the translation events encountered when queries cross the language barrier in crosslanguage information retrieval. A study of a set of query source and target triples resulted in the creation of a translation taxonomy. The taxonomy was used to code 750 English target queries. The 750 coded queries are currently being used in retrieval experiments to assess the impact of the different translation problems on retrieval performance. 1