Silvia Quarteroni


2012

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Evaluating Multi-focus Natural Language Queries over Data Services
Silvia Quarteroni | Vincenzo Guerrisi | Pietro La Torre
Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12)

Natural language interfaces to data services will be a key technology to guarantee access to huge data repositories in an effortless way. This involves solving the complex problem of recognizing a relevant service or service composition given an ambiguous, potentially ungrammatical natural language question. As a first step toward this goal, we study methods for identifying the salient terms (or foci) in natural language questions, classifying the latter according to a taxonomy of services and extracting additional relevant information in order to route them to suitable data services. While current approaches deal with single-focus (and therefore single-domain) questions, we investigate multi-focus questions in the aim of supporting conjunctive queries over the data services they refer to. Since such complex queries have seldom been studied in the literature, we have collected an ad-hoc dataset, SeCo-600, containing 600 multi-domain queries annotated with a number of linguistic and pragmatic features. Our experiments with the dataset have allowed us to reach very high accuracy in different phases of query analysis, especially when adopting machine learning methods.

2011

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Question Answering, Semantic Search and Data Service Querying
Silvia Quarteroni
Proceedings of the KRAQ11 workshop

2010

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Investigating Clarification Strategies in a Hybrid POMDP Dialog Manager
Sebastian Varges | Silvia Quarteroni | Giuseppe Riccardi | Alexei Ivanov
Proceedings of the SIGDIAL 2010 Conference

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Cooperative User Models in Statistical Dialog Simulators
Meritxell González | Silvia Quarteroni | Giuseppe Riccardi | Sebastian Varges
Proceedings of the SIGDIAL 2010 Conference

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A Comprehensive Resource to Evaluate Complex Open Domain Question Answering
Silvia Quarteroni | Alessandro Moschitti
Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10)

Complex Question Answering is a discipline that involves a deep understanding of question/answer relations, such as those characterizing definition and procedural questions and their answers. To contribute to the improvement of this technology, we deliver two question and answer corpora for complex questions, WEB-QA and TREC-QA, extracted by the same Question Answering system, YourQA, from the Web and from the AQUAINT-6 data collection respectively. We believe that such corpora can be useful resources to address a type of QA that is far from being efficiently solved. WEB-QA and TREC-QA are available in two formats: judgment files and training/testing files. Judgment files contain a ranked list of candidate answers to TREC-10 complex questions, extracted using YourQA as a baseline system and manually labelled according to a Likert scale from 1 (completely incorrect) to 5 (totally correct). Training and testing files contain learning instances compatible with SVM-light; these are useful for experimenting with shallow and complex structural features such as parse trees and semantic role labels. Our experiments with the above corpora have allowed to prove that structured information representation is useful to improve the accuracy of complex QA systems and to re-rank answers.

2009

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Combining POMDPs trained with User Simulations and Rule-based Dialogue Management in a Spoken Dialogue System
Sebastian Varges | Silvia Quarteroni | Giuseppe Riccardi | Alexei V. Ivanov | Pierluigi Roberti
Proceedings of the ACL-IJCNLP 2009 Software Demonstrations

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Annotating Spoken Dialogs: From Speech Segments to Dialog Acts and Frame Semantics
Marco Dinarelli | Silvia Quarteroni | Sara Tonelli | Alessandro Moschitti | Giuseppe Riccardi
Proceedings of SRSL 2009, the 2nd Workshop on Semantic Representation of Spoken Language

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Addressing How-to Questions using a Spoken Dialogue System: a Viable Approach?
Silvia Quarteroni | Patrick Saint-Dizier
Proceedings of the 2009 Workshop on Knowledge and Reasoning for Answering Questions (KRAQ 2009)

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Leveraging POMDPs Trained with User Simulations and Rule-based Dialogue Management in a Spoken Dialogue System
Sebastian Varges | Silvia Quarteroni | Giuseppe Riccardi | Alexei Ivanov | Pierluigi Roberti
Proceedings of the SIGDIAL 2009 Conference

2008

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Kernels on Linguistic Structures for Answer Extraction
Alessandro Moschitti | Silvia Quarteroni
Proceedings of ACL-08: HLT, Short Papers

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Persistent Information State in a Data-Centric Architecture
Sebastian Varges | Giuseppe Riccardi | Silvia Quarteroni
Proceedings of the 9th SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue

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Personalized, Interactive Question Answering on the Web
Silvia Quarteroni
Coling 2008: Proceedings of the workshop on Knowledge and Reasoning for Answering Questions

2007

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Exploiting Syntactic and Shallow Semantic Kernels for Question Answer Classification
Alessandro Moschitti | Silvia Quarteroni | Roberto Basili | Suresh Manandhar
Proceedings of the 45th Annual Meeting of the Association of Computational Linguistics

2006

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Incorporating User Models in Question Answering to ImproveReadability
Silvia Quarteroni | Suresh Manandhar
Proceedings of the Workshop KRAQ’06: Knowledge and Reasoning for Language Processing

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Adaptivity in Question Answering with User Modelling and a Dialogue Interface
Silvia Quarteroni | Suresh Manandhar
Demonstrations