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QUESTION AND ANSWERING

Learn about the fundamentals of Question Answering (QA), its benefits, working mechanisms, common challenges, real-world examples, and the future of this technology. Explore how QA transforms search engines to better understand and respond in natural language.

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QUESTION AND ANSWERING

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  1. QUESTION AND ANSWERING

  2. Overview • What is Question Answering? • Why use it? • How does it work? • Problems • Examples • Future

  3. What is it? • Definition of Question Answering • Examples • AskJeeves is probably most well known example • AnswerBus is an open-domain question answering system • Ionaut, EasyAsk, AnswerLogic, AnswerFriend, Start, LCC, Quasm, Mulder, Webclopedia, etc.

  4. Why use it? • From AskJeeves “Search engines do not speak your language. They make you speak their language; a language that's strange, confusing, and includes words that no one is entirely sure of their meaning.” • QA engines attempt to let you ask your question the way you'd normally ask it . • Inexperienced users • Document=Answer?

  5. How does it work? • Natural Language Processing • Semantic Processing • Syntactic Processing • Parsing • Knowledge Base • Answer Processing

  6. Natural Language Processing (NLP) • Engines have unique processes • START-Natural Language System • Parsing • Natural Language Annotation • Processing Component

  7. Answer Processing

  8. AskJeeves • Has own knowledge base and uses partners to answer questions • Catalogues previous questions • Answer processing engine • Question template response

  9. AnswerBus

  10. Problems • How and Why questions • What questions • What happened? • What did we do? • Answer Quality • Correct?? • Answer Presentation

  11. Correct? (From Webclopedia) • Question: Where do lobsters like to live?Answer: on a Canadian airline • Question: Where do hyenas live?Answer: in Saudi ArabiaAnswer: in the back of pick-up trucks • Question: Where are zebras most likely found?Answer: near dumpsAnswer: in the dictionary • Question: Why can't ostriches fly?Answer: Because of American economic sanctions • Collected by Ulf Hermjakob --November 29, 2001

  12. (TREC) -- Text Retrieval Conference • Yearly information retrieval competition • Began in 1992: QA in 1999 • In order to encourage research into systems that return answers rather than document lists. • Q’s are open domain, closed class • A’s are less than 50 chars and entities or noun phrases

  13. (TREC) -- Text Retrieval Conference • 500 Questions in 2001 • Some answers = nil; large difficulty • Lots of definition questions • QA list tasks • Name 4 cities that have a “Shubert” theater. • QA context tasks • How many species of spiders are there? • How many are poisonous to humans? • What percentage of spider bites in the US are fatal?

  14. Example Questions and Results • What river in the US is known as the Big Muddy? • AskJeeves • AnswerBus • Google

  15. Example Questions and Results • What person’s head is on a dime? • AskJeeves • AnswerBus • AltaVista

  16. Example Questions and Results • Show some paintings by Claude Monet • START

  17. Looking Ahead • User Demand • Enormous Interest in Problem • Successes

  18. Conclusion • Question and Answering and Search Engines • Why its used • Future • Moore’s Law for QA???

  19. Sources • AskMSR: Question Answering Using the Worldwide Web • Michele Banko, Eric Brill, Susan Dumais, Jimmy Lin • http://www.ai.mit.edu/people/jimmylin/publications/Banko-etal-AAAI02.pdf • In Proceedings of 2002 AAAI SYMPOSIUM on Mining Answers from Text and Knowledge Bases, March 2002  • Web Question Answering: Is More Always Better? • Susan Dumais, Michele Banko, Eric Brill, Jimmy Lin, Andrew Ng • http://research.microsoft.com/~sdumais/SIGIR2002-QA-Submit-Conf.pdf

  20. Sources • AnswerBus • www.answerbus.com • http://misshoover.si.umich.edu/~zzheng/qa-new/ • http://www2002.org/CDROM/poster/203/ • AskJeeves • http://www.ask.co.uk/docs/about/what_is.asp • Webclopedia • http://trec.nist.gov/pubs/trec9/papers/webclopedia.pdf • http://www.isi.edu/natural-language/projects/webclopedia/ • Start • http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/infolab/ailab.html • Text Retrieval Conference • http://trec.nist.gov/presentations/TREC10/qa/

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