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Semantic Definition Ranking

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 10178))

Abstract

Question answering has been a focus of much attention from academia and industry. Search engines have already tried to provide direct answers for question-like queries. Among these queries, “What” is one of the biggest segments. Since results excerpted from Wikipedia often have a coverage problem, some models begin to rank definitions that are extracted from web documents, including Ranking SVM and Maximum Entropy Context Model. But they only adopt syntactic features and cannot understand definitions semantically. In this paper, we propose a language model incorporating knowledge bases to learn the regularities behind good definitions. It combines recurrent neural network based language model with a process of mapping words to context-appropriate concepts. Using the knowledge learnt from neural networks, we define two semantic features to evaluate definitions, one of which is confirmed to be effective by experiments. Results show that our model improves precision a lot. Our approach has been applied in production.

This research was partially supported by the grants from the National Key Research and Development Program of China (No. 2016YFB1000603, 2016YFB1000602); the Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61532010, 61379050, 91646203, 61532016); Specialized Research Fund for the Doctoral Program of Higher Education (No. 20130004130001), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, the Research Funds of Renmin University (No. 11XNL010).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The angle brackets mean a word and its concept.

  2. 2.

    If there is a contradiction among annotators, they will be asked to re-annotate the definition. If different opinions still exist, another two annotators will take part, and we will adopt the label given by most annotators.

  3. 3.

    https://code.google.com/archive/p/word2vec/.

  4. 4.

    http://www.rnnlm.org.

  5. 5.

    https://dumps.wikimedia.org/.

  6. 6.

    Probase data is available at http://probase.msra.cn/dataset.aspx.

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Correspondence to Xiaofeng Meng .

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Hao, Z., Wang, Z., Meng, X., Yan, J., Wang, Q. (2017). Semantic Definition Ranking. In: Candan, S., Chen, L., Pedersen, T., Chang, L., Hua, W. (eds) Database Systems for Advanced Applications. DASFAA 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10178. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55699-4_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55699-4_10

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