Implementing clarification dialogues in open domain question answering (original) (raw)
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An analysis of clarification dialogue for question answering
Proceedings of the 2003 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics on Human Language Technology - NAACL '03, 2003
We examine clarification dialogue, a mechanism for refining user questions with follow-up questions, in the context of open domain Question Answering systems. We develop an algorithm for clarification dialogue recognition through the analysis of collected data on clarification dialogues and examine the importance of clarification dialogue recognition for question answering. The algorithm is evaluated and shown to successfully recognize the occurrence of clarification dialogue in the majority of cases and to simplify the task of answer retrieval.
CLARIE: Handling Clarification Requests in a Dialogue System
Research on Language and Computation, 2006
This paper sets out a approach to clarification requests (CRs) general enough to cover all the major forms found in corpus data and specific enough to analyse the questions they ask about individual words and phrases. Its main features are a view of utterances as contextual abstracts with a radically abstracted semantic representation, and a view of CRs as standard utterances asking standard questions, but showing a particular kind of contextual dependence. It shows how it can be implemented computationally within a prototype text-based dialogue system, CLARIE, allowing it not only to generate CRs to clarify unknown reference and learn new words, but also to interpret and respond to user CRs, with both capabilities integrated within the standard dialogue processes and governed by empirical evidence.
Interactive Question Answering
Emerging Applications of Natural Language Processing
The increasing amount of information available online has led to the development of technologies that help to deal with it. One of them is Interactive Question Answering (IQA), a research field that has emerged at the intersection of question answering and dialogue systems, and which allows users to find the answers to questions in an interactive way. During the answering process, the automatic system can initiate a dialogue with the user in order to clarify missing or ambiguous information, or suggest further topics for discussion. This chapter presents the state-of-the-art in the field of interactive question answering. Given that IQA inherits a lot of features from dialogue systems and question answering, these fields are also briefly presented. Analysis of the existing systems reveals that in general IQA systems rely on a scaled-down version of a dialogue system, sometimes built on top of question answering systems. Evaluation of IQA is also discussed, showing that it combines e...
Designing an interactive open-domain question answering system
Natural Language Engineering, 2009
Interactive question answering (QA), where a dialogue interface enables follow-up and clarification questions, is a recent although long-advocated field of research. We report on the design and implementation of YourQA, our open-domain, interactive QA system. YourQA relies on a Web search engine to obtain answers to both fact-based and complex questions, such as descriptions and definitions.
Improving question-answering with linking dialogues
Proceedings of the 11th …, 2006
Question-answering dialogue systems have found many applications in interactive learning environments. This paper is concerned with one such application for Army leadership training, where trainees input free-text questions that elicit prerecorded video responses. Since these responses are already crafted before the question is asked, a certain degree of incoherence exists between the question that is asked and the answer that is given. This paper explores the use of short linking dialogues that stand in between the question and its video response to alleviate the problem of incoherence. We describe a set of experiments with human generated linking dialogues that demonstrate their added value. We then describe our implementation of an automated method for utilizing linking dialogues and show that these have better coherence properties than the original system without linking dialogues.
Toward Dialogue Modeling: A Semantic Annotation Scheme for Questions and Answers
Proceedings of the 13th Linguistic Annotation Workshop
The present study proposes an annotation scheme for classifying the content and discourse contribution of question-answer pairs. We propose detailed guidelines for using the scheme and apply them to dialogues in English, Spanish, and Dutch. Finally, we report on initial machine learning experiments for automatic annotation.
A novel challenge for evaluating open-domain question answering technologies is proposed. In this challenge, question answering systems are supposed to be used interactively to answer a series of related questions, whereas in the conventional setting, systems answer isolated questions one by one. Such an interaction occurs in the case of gathering information for a report on a specific topic, or when browsing information of interest to the user. In this paper, first, we explain the design of the challenge. We then discuss its reality and show how the capabilities measured by the challenge are useful and important in practical situations, and that the difficulty of the challenge is proper for evaluating the current state of open-domain question answering technologies.
A Dialog system for controlling question/answer dialogues
2007
Abstract In this paper we present a dialogue system that is able to maintain a conversation with an user who poses questions about the existence of Supreme Court texts with some particular characteristics. The system we propose, is able to handle ambiguities in the user questions, clarifications made by the user and the situations where the user starts parallel discourses by introducing incompatible characteristics in its questions.
Some issues in dialogue-based question-answering
2003
We present ongoing work on how to combine a multimodal dialogue system with techniques from information extraction and question-answering systems. A first combined system including both dialogue features and information extraction (BirdQuest) is presented. We conclude by listing a number of issues for further research.
Question Answering Challenge for Information Access Dialogue - Overview of NTCIR4 QAC2 Subtask 3
2004
We describe an overview of Question Answering Challenge (QAC) 2 Subtask 3, a novel challenge for evaluating open-domain question answering technologies, at the NTCIR Workshop 4. In QAC2 Subtask 3, question answering systems are supposed to be used interactively to answer a series of related questions, whereas in the conventional setting, systems answer isolated questions one by one. Such an interaction occurs in the case of gathering information for a report on a specific topic, or when browsing information of interest to the user. In this paper, first, we explain the design of the challenge. Reporting the results of the run conducted and techniques employed there, we then show that existing technologies have the potential to address this challenge.