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When, Where, Who, What or Why? A Hybrid Model to Question Answering Systems

  • Conference paper
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Computational Processing of the Portuguese Language (PROPOR 2018)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 11122))

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Abstract

Question Answering Systems is a field of Information Retrieval and Natural Language Processing that automatically answers questions posed by humans in a natural language. One of the main steps of these systems is the Question Classification, where the system tries to identify the type of question (i.e. if it is related to a person, time or a location) facilitate the generation of a precise answer. Machine learning techniques are commonly employed in tasks where the text is represented as a vector of features, such as bag–of–words, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) or word embeddings. However, the quality of results produced by supervised algorithms is dependent on the existence of a large, domain-dependent training dataset which sometimes is unavailable due to labor-intense of manual annotation of datasets. Normally, word embedding presents a related better performance on small training sets, while bag-of-words and TF-IDF presents better results on large training sets. In this work, we propose a hybrid model that combines TF-IDF and word embedding in order to provide the answer type to text questions using small and large training sets. Our experiments using the Portuguese language, using several different sizes of training sets, showed that the proposed hybrid model statistically outperforms bag-of-words, TF-IDF, and word embedding approaches.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. PPGC, Institute of Informatics, Federal University of Rio Grande Do Sul (UFRGS), Caixa Postal 15.064, Porto Alegre, RS, 91.501-970, Brazil

    Eduardo G. Cortes, Vinicius Woloszyn & Dante A. C. Barone

Authors
  1. Eduardo G. Cortes
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  2. Vinicius Woloszyn
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  3. Dante A. C. Barone
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Eduardo G. Cortes .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Informatics, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil

    Aline Villavicencio

  2. Instituto de Informática - UFRGS, Porto Alegre, Brazil

    Viviane Moreira

  3. INESC-ID, Lisbon, Portugal

    Alberto Abad

  4. UFSCAR, Sao Carlos, Brazil

    Helena Caseli

  5. Centro Singular de Investigación en Tecnoloxías, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, Santiago de Compostela, La Coruña, Spain

    Pablo Gamallo

  6. Université de Toulon, Parc Scientifique Technologique Luminy, Marseille, France

    Carlos Ramisch

  7. Centro de Informática e Sistemas, Universidade de Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal

    Hugo Gonçalo Oliveira

  8. Federal University of Technology, Dois Vizinhos, Paraná, Brazil

    Gustavo Henrique Paetzold

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Cortes, E.G., Woloszyn, V., Barone, D.A.C. (2018). When, Where, Who, What or Why? A Hybrid Model to Question Answering Systems. In: Villavicencio, A., et al. Computational Processing of the Portuguese Language. PROPOR 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11122. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99722-3_14

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99722-3_14

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-99721-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-99722-3

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