Abstract
The capability of handling anaphora is becoming a key feature for Question Answering systems, as it can play a crucial role at different stages of the QA loop. At the question processing stage, on which this paper is focused, it enhances the treatment of follow-up questions, allowing for a more natural interaction with the user. As much as the QA task evolves towards a realistic dialogue-based scenario, one of the concrete problems raised by follow-up questions is tracking their actual referent. Each question may in fact refer to the topic of the session, to an answer given to an earlier question, or to a new entity it introduces in the dialogue. Focusing on the referent traceability problem, we present and experiment with a possible data-driven solution which exploits simple features of the input question and its surrounding context (the target of the session, and the previous questions) to inform the next phases of the QA process.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Burger, J., et al.: Issues, Tasks and Program Structures to Roadmap Research in Question & Answering (Q&A). In: Document Understanding Conferences Roadmapping Documents (2001)
Chai, J.Y., Jin, R.: Discourse Structure for Context Question Answering. In: Proceedings of the HLT-NAACL 2004 Workshop on Pragmatics of Question Answering, Boston, MA, May 6-7 (2004)
Fellbaum, C.: WordNet: An Electronic Lexical Database. MIT Press, Cambridge (1998)
Fliedner, G.: Towards Natural Interactive Question Answering. In: Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation - LREC-2006, Genoa, Italy, May 22-28 (2006)
Harabagiu, S., et al.: Experiments with Interactive Question-Answering. In: Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA, June 25-30 (2005)
Kouylekov, M., et al.: ITC-irst at TREC-2003: the DIOGENE QA system. In: Proceedings of TREC 2003 (2004)
Luo, X., et al.: A Mention-Synchronous Coreference Resolution Algorithm Based on the Bell Tree. In: Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Barcelona, Spain, July 21 - 26 (2004)
Magnini, B., et al.: Mining Knowledge from Repeated Co-occurrences: DIOGENE at TREC-2002. In: Proceedings of TREC 2002 (2003)
Morton, T.: Coreference for NLP Applications. In: Proceedings of the 38th Annual Meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics, Hong-Kong, October 3-6 (2000)
Morton, T.: Using coreference for question answering. In: Proceedings of the ACL 1999 Workshop on Coreference and Its Applications, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA, June 22 (1999)
MUC-6: Proceedings of the Sixth Message Understanding Conference (MUC-6). Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco (1995)
MUC-7: Proceedings of the Seventh Message Understanding Conference (MUC-7), Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco (1998)
Ng, V., Cardie, C.: Improving Machine Learning Approaches to Coreference Resolution. In: Proceedings of the 40th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Philadelphia, PA, July 6-12 (2002)
Novischi, A., Moldovan, D.: Question Answering with Lexical Chains Propagating Verb Arguments. In: Proceedings of COLING-ACL 2006, Sydney, Australia, July 17-21 (2006)
Quinlan, R.: C4.5: Programs for Machine Learning. Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco (1993)
Soon, W.M., Ng, H.T., Lim, D.C.Y.: A Machine Learning Approach to Coreference Resolution of Noun Phrases. Computational Linguistics 27(4), 521–544 (2001)
Strube, M., Muller, C.: A Machine Learning Approach to Pronoun Resolution in Spoken Dialogue. In: Proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics, Sapporo, Japan, July 7-12 (2003)
Vicedo, J.L., Ferrández, A.: Importance of Pronominal Anaphora Resolution in Question Answering Systems. In: Proceedings of the 38th Annual Meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics, Hong-Kong, October 3-6 (2000)
Voorhees, E.: Overview of the TREC 2004 Question Answering Track. In: TREC 2004 Proceedings (2005)
Witten, I.H., Frank, E.: Data Mining: Practical machine learning tools and techniques. Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco (2005)
Watson, R., Preiss, J., Briscoe, T.: The Contribution of Domain-Independent Robust Pronominal Anaphora Resolution to Open-Domain Question Answering. In: Proceedings of the Symposium on Reference Resolution and its Applications to Question Answering and Summarization, Venice, Italy, June 23-25 (2003)
Yang, X., et al.: Coreference Resolution Using Competition Learning Approach Proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics, Sapporo, Japan, July 7-12 (2003)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2007 Springer Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Negri, M., Kouylekov, M. (2007). “Who Are We Talking About?” Tracking the Referent in a Question Answering Series. In: Branco, A. (eds) Anaphora: Analysis, Algorithms and Applications. DAARC 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 4410. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-71412-5_12
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-71412-5_12
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-71411-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-71412-5
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)