A Noisy Approach to Question Answering

1. A Noisy Approach to Question Answering • Hasan Saygın Arkan • Abdullah Şahin

2. Question Answering • Task of automatically answering a question • Current systems are extremely complex • Difficult to understand what module contribute to the performance

3. Basic Mechanism • IR Engine : Retrieves a set of M documents/N sentences that may contain an answer • Identifier Module : Identify a substring and assign a rank to it.

4. Problem : Word Overlap • Q : Who is the leader of France? • “Henri Hadjenberg, who is the Leader of France’s Jewish community....” • “Bush met with French President Jacques Chirac”

5. Noisy Channel Approach • Intended to solve problems where one assumes all attempted words have been accidentally scrambled • spell checkers • speech recognition • machine translation

6. Cut Tree • Overlapping Terms : Surface Text • Prefixed : A_ ( e.g. A_DATE) • Non Answer Terms : Non-leaves • All others : Surface Text

7. Example • Q : When did Elvis Presley die? • A : Presley died PP PP in A_DATE, and SNT

9. Example • Q : When did _Person die? • A : _Person died PP PP in A_DATE, and SNT

10. Thanks for Listening