This paper proposes a new idea that uses Wikipedia categories as answer types and defines candidate sets inside Wikipedia. The focus of a given question is searched in the hierarchy of Wikipedia main pages. Our searching strategy combines head-noun matching and synonym matching provided in semantic resources. The set of answer candidates is determined by the entry hierarchy in Wikipedia and the hyponymy hierarchy in WordNet. The experimental results show that the approach can find candidate sets in a smaller size but achieve better performance especially for ARTIFACT and ORGANIZATION types, where the performance is better than state-of-the-art Chinese factoid QA systems.

Commonsense knowledge is essential for fully understanding language in many situations. We acquire large-scale commonsense knowledge from humans using a game with a purpose (GWAP) developed on a smartphone spoken dialogue system. We transform the manual knowledge acquisition process into an enjoyable quiz game and have collected over 150,000 unique commonsense facts by gathering the data of more than 70,000 players over eight months. In this paper, we present a simple method for maintaining the quality of acquired knowledge and an empirical analysis of the knowledge acquisition process. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to collect large-scale knowledge via a GWAP on a widely-used spoken dialogue system.

This paper describes a hierarchical neural network we propose for sentence classification to extract product information from product documents. The network classifies each sentence in a document into attribute and condition classes on the basis of word sequences and sentence sequences in the document. Experimental results showed the method using the proposed network significantly outperformed baseline methods by taking semantic representation of word and sentence sequential data into account. We also evaluated the network with two different product domains (insurance and tourism domains) and found that it was effective for both the domains.

Question answering is always an attractive and challenging task in natural language processing area. There are some open domain question answering systems, such as IBM Waston, which take the unstructured text data as input, in some ways of humanlike thinking process and a mode of artificial intelligence. At the conference on Natural Language Processing and Chinese Computing (NLPCC) 2016, China Computer Federation hosted a shared task evaluation about Open Domain Question Answering. We achieve the 2nd place at the document-based subtask. In this paper, we present our solution, which consists of feature engineering in lexical and semantic aspects and model training methods. As the result of the evaluation shows, our solution provides a valuable and brief model which could be used in modelling question answering or sentence semantic relevance. We hope our solution would contribute to this vast and significant task with some heuristic thinking.

An Entity-based approach to Answering recurrent and non-recurrent questions with Past Answers Abstract Community question answering (CQA) systems such as Yahoo! Answers allow registered-users to ask and answer questions in various question categories. However, a significant percentage of asked questions in Yahoo! Answers are unanswered. In this paper, we propose to reduce this percentage by reusing answers to past resolved questions from the site. Specifically, we propose to satisfy unanswered questions in entity rich categories by searching for and reusing the best answers to past resolved questions with shared needs. For unanswered questions that do not have a past resolved question with a shared need, we propose to use the best answer to a past resolved question with similar needs. Our experiments on a Yahoo! Answers dataset shows that our approach retrieves most of the past resolved questions that have shared and similar needs to unanswered questions.

In an era where highly accurate Question Answering (QA) systems are being built using complex Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Information Retrieval (IR) algorithms, presenting the acquired answer to the user akin to a human answer is also crucial. In this paper we present an answer presentation strategy by embedding the answer in a sentence which is developed by incorporating the linguistic structure of the source question extracted through typed dependency parsing. The evaluation using human participants proved that the methodology is human-competitive and can result in linguistically correct sentences for more that 70% of the test dataset acquired from QALD question dataset.

Question answering (QA) systems need to provide exact answers for the questions that are posed to the system. However, this can only be achieved through a precise processing of the question. During this procedure, one important step is the detection of the expected type of answer that the system should provide by extracting the headword of the questions and identifying its semantic type. We have annotated the headword and assigned UMLS semantic types to 643 factoid/list questions from the BioASQ training data. We present statistics on the corpus and a preliminary evaluation in baseline experiments. We also discuss the challenges on both the manual annotation and the automatic detection of the headwords and the semantic types. We believe that this is a valuable resource for both training and evaluation of biomedical QA systems. The corpus is available at: https://github.com/mariananeves/BioMedLAT.

The paper describes topic shifting in dialogues with a robot that provides information from Wiki-pedia. The work focuses on a double topical construction of dialogue coherence which refers to discourse coherence on two levels: the evolution of dialogue topics via the interaction between the user and the robot system, and the creation of discourse topics via the content of the Wiki-pedia article itself. The user selects topics that are of interest to her, and the system builds a list of potential topics, anticipated to be the next topic, by the links in the article and by the keywords extracted from the article. The described system deals with Wikipedia articles, but could easily be adapted to other digital information providing systems.

Wikipedia has become a reference knowledge source for scores of NLP applications. One of its invaluable features lies in its multilingual nature, where articles on a same entity or concept can have from one to more than 200 different versions. The interlinking of language versions in Wikipedia has undergone a major renewal with the advent of Wikidata, a unified scheme to identify entities and their properties using unique numbers. However, as the interlinking is still manually carried out by thousands of editors across the globe, errors may creep in the assignment of entities. In this paper, we describe an optimization technique to match automatically language versions of articles, and hence entities, that is only based on bags of words and anchors. We created a dataset of all the articles on persons we extracted from Wikipedia in six languages: English, French, German, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish. We report a correct match of at least 94.3% on each pair.

In this paper, we present an open information extraction system so-called SRDF that generates lexical knowledge graphs from unstructured texts. In semantic web, knowledge is expressed in the RDF triple form but the natural language text consist of multiple relations between arguments. For this reason, we combine open information extraction with the reification for the full text extraction to preserve meaning of sentence in our knowledge graph. And also our knowledge graph is designed to adapt for many existing semantic web applications. At the end of this paper, we introduce the result of the experiment and a Korean template generation module developed using SRDF.

Natural language questions are interpreted to a sequence of patterns to be matched with instances of patterns in a knowledge base (KB) for answering. A natural language (NL) question answering (QA) system utilizes meaningful patterns matching the syntac-tic/lexical features between the NL questions and KB. In the most of KBs, there are only binary relations in triple form to represent relation between two entities or entity and a value using the domain specific ontology. However, the binary relation representation is not enough to cover complex information in questions, and the ontology vocabulary sometimes does not cover the lexical meaning in questions. Complex meaning needs a knowledge representation to link the binary relation-type triples in KB. In this paper, we propose a frame semantics-based semantic parsing approach as KB-independent question pre-processing. We will propose requirements of question interpretation in the KBQA perspective, and a query form representation based on our proposed format QAF (Ques-tion Answering with the Frame Semantics), which is supposed to cover the requirements. In QAF, frame semantics roles as a model to represent complex information in questions and to disambiguate the lexical meaning in questions to match with the ontology vocabu-lary. Our system takes a question as an input and outputs QAF-query by the process which assigns semantic information in the question to its corresponding frame semantic structure using the semantic parsing rules.

Answering yes–no questions is more difficult than simply retrieving ranked search results. To answer yes–no questions, especially when the correct answer is no, one must find an objectionable keyword that makes the question’s answer no. Existing systems, such as factoid-based ones, cannot answer yes–no questions very well because of insufficient handling of such objectionable keywords. We suggest an algorithm that answers yes–no questions by assigning an importance to objectionable keywords. Concretely speaking, we suggest a penalized scoring method that finds and makes lower score for parts of documents that include such objectionable keywords. We check a keyword distribution for each part of a document such as a paragraph, calculating the keyword density as a basic score. Then we use an objectionable keyword penalty when a keyword does not appear in a target part but appears in other parts of the document. Our algorithm is robust for open domain problems because it requires no training. We achieved 4.45 point better results in F1 scores than the best score of the NTCIR-10 RITE2 shared task, also obtained the best score in 2014 mock university examination challenge of the Todai Robot project.

Nowadays, a question answering (QA) system is used in various areas such a quiz show, personal assistant, home device, and so on. The OKBQA framework supports developing a QA system in an intuitive and collaborative ways. To support collaborative development, the framework should be equipped with some functions, e.g., flexible system configuration, debugging supports, intuitive user interface, and so on while considering different developing groups of different domains. This paper presents OKBQA controller, a dedicated workflow manager for OKBQA framework, to boost collaborative development of a QA system.