Dictionaries merger for text expansion in question answering

This paper presents an original way to add new data in a reference dictionary from several other lexical resources, without loosing any consistence. This operation is carried in order to get lexical information classified by the sense of the entry. This classification makes it possible to enrich utterances (in QA: the queries) following the meaning, and to reduce noise. An analysis of the experienced problems shows the interest of this method, and insists on the points that have to be tackled.Comment: 4 p

A derivational rephrasing experiment for question answering

In Knowledge Management, variations in information expressions have proven a real challenge. In particular, classical semantic relations (e.g. synonymy) do not connect words with different parts-of-speech. The method proposed tries to address this issue. It consists in building a derivational resource from a morphological derivation tool together with derivational guidelines from a dictionary in order to store only correct derivatives. This resource, combined with a syntactic parser, a semantic disambiguator and some derivational patterns, helps to reformulate an original sentence while keeping the initial meaning in a convincing manner This approach has been evaluated in three different ways: the precision of the derivatives produced from a lemma; its ability to provide well-formed reformulations from an original sentence, preserving the initial meaning; its impact on the results coping with a real issue, ie a question answering task . The evaluation of this approach through a question answering system shows the pros and cons of this system, while foreshadowing some interesting future developments

Managing conflicts between users in Wikipedia

Wikipedia is nowadays a widely used encyclopedia, and one of the most visible sites on the Internet. Its strong principle of collaborative work and free editing sometimes generates disputes due to disagreements between users. In this article we study how the wikipedian community resolves the conflicts and which roles do wikipedian choose in this process. We observed the users behavior both in the article talk pages, and in the Arbitration Committee pages specifically dedicated to serious disputes. We first set up a users typology according to their involvement in conflicts and their publishing and management activity in the encyclopedia. We then used those user types to describe users behavior in contributing to articles that are tagged by the wikipedian community as being in conflict with the official guidelines of Wikipedia, or conversely as being well featured.Comment: 12 p