Identification of the Question Focus: Combining Syntactic Analysis and Ontology-based Lookup through the User Interaction

Danica Damljanovic, Milan Agatonovic, Hamish Cunningham

Abstract
Most question-answering systems contain a classifier module which determines a question category, based on which each question is assigned an answer type. However, setting up syntactic patterns for this classification is a big challenge. In addition, in the case of ontology-based systems, the answer type should be aligned to the queried knowledge structure. In this paper, we present an approach for determining the answer type semi-automatically. We first identify the question focus using syntactic parsing, and then try to identify the answer type by combining the head of the focus with the ontology-based lookup. When this combination is not enough to make conclusions automatically, the user is engaged into a dialog in order to resolve the answer type. User selections are saved and used for training the system in order to improve its performance over time. Further on, the answer type is used to show the feedback and the concise answer to the user. Our approach is evaluated using 250 questions from the Mooney Geoquery dataset.
Anthology ID:
L10-1361
Volume:
Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10)
Month:
May
Year:
2010
Address:
Valletta, Malta
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis, Mike Rosner, Daniel Tapias
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
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Pages:
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2010/pdf/524_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Danica Damljanovic, Milan Agatonovic, and Hamish Cunningham. 2010. Identification of the Question Focus: Combining Syntactic Analysis and Ontology-based Lookup through the User Interaction. In Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10), Valletta, Malta. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Identification of the Question Focus: Combining Syntactic Analysis and Ontology-based Lookup through the User Interaction (Damljanovic et al., LREC 2010)
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http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2010/pdf/524_Paper.pdf
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