Towards multi-stream question answering using answer validation

Motivated by the continuous growth of theWeb in the number of sites and users, several search engines attempt to extend their traditional functionality by incorporating question answering (QA) facilities. This extension seems natural but it is not straightforward since current QA systems still achie...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: ALBERTO TELLEZ VALERO, MANUEL MONTES Y GOMEZ, LUIS VILLASEÑOR PINEDA
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Estado:Versión aceptada para publicación
Fecha de publicación:2010
País:México
Institución:Instituto Nacional de Astrofísica, Óptica y Electrónica
Repositorio:Repositorio Institucional del INAOE
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:inaoe.repositorioinstitucional.mx:1009/1405
Acceso en línea:http://inaoe.repositorioinstitucional.mx/jspui/handle/1009/1405
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:info:eu-repo/classification/Question answering/Question answering
info:eu-repo/classification/Information fusion/Information fusion
info:eu-repo/classification/Answer validation/Answer validation
info:eu-repo/classification/Textual entailment/Textual entailment
info:eu-repo/classification/cti/1
info:eu-repo/classification/cti/12
info:eu-repo/classification/cti/1203
Descripción
Sumario:Motivated by the continuous growth of theWeb in the number of sites and users, several search engines attempt to extend their traditional functionality by incorporating question answering (QA) facilities. This extension seems natural but it is not straightforward since current QA systems still achieve poor performance rates for languages other than English. Based on the fact that retrieval effectiveness has been previously improved by combining evidence from multiple search engines, in this paper we propose a method that allows taking advantage of the outputs of several QA systems. This method is based on an answer validation approach that decides about the correctness of answers based on their entailment with a support text, and therefore, that reduces the influence of the answer redundancies and the system confidences. Experimental results on Spanish are encouraging; evaluated over a set of 190 questions from the CLEF 2006 collection, our method responded correctly 63% of the questions, outperforming the best QA participating system (53%) by a relative increase of 19%. In addition, when they were considered five answers per question, our method could obtain the correct answer for 73% of the questions. In this case, it outperformed traditional multi-stream techniques by generating a better ranking of the set of answers presented to the users.