New Directions in Question Answering (Paperback)

Description:

Question answering systems, which provide natural language responses to natural language queries, are the subject of rapidly advancing research encompassing both academic study and commercial applications, the most well-known of which is the search engine Ask Jeeves. Question answering draws on different fields and technologies, including natural language processing, information retrieval, explanation generation, and human computer interaction. Question answering creates an important new method of information access and can be seen as the natural step beyond such standard Web search methods as keyword query and document retrieval. This collection charts significant new directions in the field, including temporal, spatial, definitional, biographical, multimedia, and multilingual question answering.

After an introduction that defines essential terminology and provides a roadmap to future trends, the book covers key areas of research and development. These include current methods, architecture requirements, and the history of question answering on the Web; the development of systems to address new types of questions; interactivity, which is often required for clarification of questions or answers; reuse of answers; advanced methods; and knowledge representation and reasoning used to support question answering. Each section contains an introduction that summarizes the chapters included and places them in context, relating them to the other chapters in the book as well as to the existing literature in the field and assessing the problems and challenges that remain.

Mark T. Maybury is Executive Director of the Information Technology Division at the MITRE Corporation in Bedford, Massachusetts. He is the editor of Intelligent Multimedia Interfaces (AAAI/MIT Press 1993) and Intelligent Multimedia Information Retrieval (AAAI/ MIT Press 1997) and coeditor of Readings on Intelligent User Interfaces, Advances in Text Summarization (MIT Press 1999), and Advances in Knowledge Management (MIT Press 2001).

 

Table of Contents:

Preface Mark Maybury	ix
1	Question Answering: An Introduction Mark Maybury	3
	Section One: Foundations and History
	Section Introduction	15
2	Software Architectures for Advanced QA Eric Nyberg, John Burger, Scott Mardis and David Ferrucci	19
3	Bringing Commercial Question Answering to the Web Brian Ulicny	31
	Section Two: Definitional, Biographical, and Terminology QA
	Section Introduction	41
4	Answering Definitional Questions: A Hybrid Approach Sasha Blair-Goldensohn, Kathleen R. McKeown and Andrew Hazen Schlaikjer	47
5	A Hybrid Approach to Answering Biographical Questions Ralph Weischedel, Jinxi Xu and Ana Licuanan	59
6	Question Answering in Terminology-Rich Technical Domains Fabio Rinaldi, Michael Hess, James Dowdall, Diego Mollá and Rolf Schwitter	71
	Section Three: Multiperspective, Temporal, and Multimedia QA
	Section Introduction	83
7	Low-Level Annotations and Summary Representations of Opinions for Multiperspective QA Claire Cardie, Janyce M. Wiebe, Theresa Wilson and Diane J. Litman	87
8	Representing Temporal and Event Knowledge for QA Systems James Pustejovsky, Roser Saurí, José Castaño, Dragomir R. Radev, Robert Gaizauskas, Andrea Setzer, Beth Sunheim and Graham Katz	99
9	Answering Questions About Moving Objects in Videos Boris Katz, Jimmy Lin, Chris Stauffer and Eric Grimson	113
	Section Four: Interactive and Scenario-Based QA
	Section Introduction	125
10	A Data Driven Approach to Interactive QA Sharon Small, Tomek Strzalkowski, Ting Liu, Nobuyuki Shimizu and Boris Yamrom	129
11	Finding Answers to Complex Questions Anne R. Diekema, Ozgur Yilmazel, Jiangping Chen, Sarah Harwell, Lan He and Elizabeth D. Liddy	141
12	Experiences from Combining Dialogue System Development with Information Extraction Techniques Arne Jönsson, Frida Andén, Lars Degerstedt, Annika Flycht-Eriksson, Magnus Merkel and Sara Norberg	153
	Section Five: Reuse
	Section Introduction	165
13	Reuse in Question Answering: A Preliminary Study Marc Light, Abraham Ittycheriah, Andrew Latto and Nancy McCracken	169
14	Retrieval Models and Q and A Learning with FAQ Files Noriko Tomuro and Steven L. Lytinen	183
	Section Six: Advanced Methods for Question Processing and Answering
	Section Introduction	195
15	Holistic Query Expansion Using Graphical Models Daniel Mahler	203
16	Viewing the Web as a Virtual Database for Question Answering Boris Katz, Sue Felshin, Jimmy Lin and Gregory Marton	215
17	Toward Answer-Focused Summarization Using Search Engines Harris Wu, Dragomir R. Radev and Weiguo Fan	227
18	A Multi-Agent Approach to Using Redundancy and Reinforcement in Question Answering John Prager, Jennifer Chu-Carroll and Krzysztof Czuba	237
	Section Seven: Knowledge and Inference-Enabled Question Answering
	Section Introduction	249
19	Deductive Question Answering from Multiple Resources Richard Waldinger, Douglas Appelt, Jennifer L. Dungan, John Fry, Jerry Hobbs, David J. Israel, Peter Jarvis, David Martin, Susanne Riehemann, Mark E. Stickel and Mabry Tyson	253
20	Advanced Relaxation for Cooperative Question Answering Farah Benamara and Patrick Saint Dizier	263
21	Trusting Answers from Web Applications Deborah L. McGuinness and Paulo Pinheiro da Silva	275
	Glossary of Acronyms	287
	Bibliography	293
	Index	317