Abstract
We investigated to what extent users could be satisfied by a web search engine for answering causal questions. We used an assessment environment in which a web search interface was simulated. For 1 401 why-queries from a search engine log we pre-retrieved the first 10 results using Bing. 311 queries were assessed by human judges. We found that even without clicking a result, 25.2% of the why-questions is answered on the first result page. If we count an intended click on a result as a vote for relevance, then 74.4% of the why-questions gets at least one relevant answer in the top-10. 10% of why-queries asked to web search engines are not answerable according to human assessors.
Keywords
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Kwok, C., Etzioni, O., Weld, D.: Scaling question answering to the Web. ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS) 19(3), 242–262 (2001)
Maybury, M.: Toward a Question Answering Roadmap. In: New Directions in Question Answering, pp. 8–11 (2003)
Girju, R.: Automatic detection of causal relations for question answering. In: Proceedings of the ACL 2003 Workshop on Multilingual Summarization and Question Answering, vol. 12, p. 83. Association for Computational Linguistics (2003)
Pechsiri, C., Kawtrakul, A.: Mining Causality from Texts for Question Answering System. IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems 90(10), 1523–1533 (2007)
Verberne, S., Boves, L., Oostdijk, N., Coppen, P.: Discourse-based Answering of Why-Questions. Traitement Automatique des Langues (TAL), special issue on Discours et document: traitements automatiques 47(2), 21–41 (2007)
Vazquez-Reyes, S., Black, W.: Evaluating Causal Questions for Question Answering. In: Mexican International Conference on Computer Science, ENC 2008, pp. 132–142 (2008)
Higashinaka, R., Isozaki, H.: Corpus-based Question Answering for Why-Questions. In: Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP), pp. 418–425 (2008)
Verberne, S., Boves, L., Oostdijk, N., Coppen, P.: What is not in the Bag of Words for Why-QA? Computational Linguistics 32(2), 229–245 (2010)
Verberne, S., Van Halteren, H., Theijssen, D., Raaijmakers, S., Boves, L.: Learning to Rank for Why-Question Answering. In: Information Retrieval (2010), doi:10.1007/s10791-010-9136-6
Adamic, L., Zhang, J., Bakshy, E., Ackerman, M.: Knowledge sharing and yahoo answers: everyone knows something. In: Proceeding of the 17th International Conference on World Wide Web, pp. 665–674. ACM, New York (2008)
Ignatova, K., Toprak, C., Bernhard, D., Gurevych, I.: Annotating Question Types in Social Q&A Sites. In: GSCL Symposium” Language Technology and eHumanities. Citeseer (2009)
Joachims, T., Granka, L., Pan, B., Hembrooke, H., Gay, G.: Accurately interpreting clickthrough data as implicit feedback. In: Proceedings of the 28th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, pp. 154–161. ACM, New York (2005)
Dumais, S., Banko, M., Brill, E., Lin, J., Ng, A.: Web question answering: Is more always better? In: Proceedings of the 25th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, pp. 291–298. ACM, New York (2002)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Verberne, S., Boves, L., Kraaij, W. (2011). Bringing Why-QA to Web Search. In: Clough, P., et al. Advances in Information Retrieval. ECIR 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6611. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-20161-5_48
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-20161-5_48
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-20160-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-20161-5
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)