skip to main content
10.1145/1458484.1458497acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagescikmConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

Incorporation of corpus-specific semantic information into question answering context

Published: 30 October 2008 Publication History

Abstract

In today's environment of information overload, Question Answering (QA) is a critically important research area for the Semantic Web. In order for humans to make effective use of the expansive information sources available to us, we require automated tools to help us make sense of large amounts of data. Within this framework, Question Context plays an important role. We define Question Context to be an semantic structure that can be used to enrich queries so that the user's information need is better represented. This paper describes the theoretical foundations of a novel approach that uses statistical language modeling techniques to create Question Context and to then integrate it into the Information Retrieval stage of QA. We base our approach on two established language modeling methods - the Aspect Model, which is the basis of Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis (PLSA) and Relevance-Based Language Models. Our approach proposes an Aspect-Based Relevance Language Model as the Question Context Model, and our methodology incorporates corpus-specific semantic concepts into the QA process. Words from the most heavily relevant aspects are then incorporated into the query. We present some interesting preliminary qualitative results that show the potential usefulness of the Question Context Model to both the first (IR) and second (Intelligent Information Processing) stages of QA.

References

[1]
Dempster, A. P., Laird, N. M., and Rubin, D. B., "Maximum Likelihood from Incomplete Data via the EM Algorithm," Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, vol. 39, pp. 1--38, 1977.
[2]
Hirschman, L. and Gaizauskas, R., "Natural language question answering: the view from here," Natural Language Engineering, vol. 7, pp. 275--300, 2002.
[3]
Hofmann, T., "Probabilistic latent semantic indexing," Proceedings of the 22nd Annual International SIGIR Conference on Research and Development In Information Retrieval, 1999.
[4]
Lavrenko, V. and Croft, W. B., "Relevance based language models," Proceedings of the 24th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, pp. 120--127, 2001.
[5]
Manning, C. D., Raghavan, P., and Schutze, H., Introduction to Information Retrieval: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
[6]
Strohman, T., Metzler, D., Turtle, H., and Croft, W. B., "Indri: A language model-based search engine for complex queries," in presented as a poster at the International Conference on Intelligence Analysis McLean, VA, 2005.
[7]
Voorhees, E. M. and Harman, D. K., TREC: Experiment and Evaluation in Information Retrieval (Digital Libraries and Electronic Publishing): The MIT Press, 2005.
[8]
Voorhees, E. M., "Overview of the TREC 2006 Question Answering Track," in Online proceedings of 2006 Text Retrieval Conference, 2006.

Cited By

View all
  • (2022)A Systematic Literature Review of Question Answering: Research Trends, Datasets, MethodsComputational Science and Its Applications – ICCSA 2022 Workshops10.1007/978-3-031-10536-4_4(47-62)Online publication date: 4-Jul-2022
  • (2015)Supporting early contextualization of textual content in digital documents on the WebProceedings of the 2015 13th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR)10.1109/ICDAR.2015.7333926(1071-1075)Online publication date: 23-Aug-2015
  • (2009)Language Modeling Approaches to Information RetrievalJournal of Computing Science and Engineering10.5626/JCSE.2009.3.3.1433:3(143-164)Online publication date: 30-Sep-2009
  • Show More Cited By

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences
ONISW '08: Proceedings of the 2nd international workshop on Ontologies and information systems for the semantic web
October 2008
124 pages
ISBN:9781605582559
DOI:10.1145/1458484
  • General Chair:
  • Ramez Elmasri,
  • Program Chairs:
  • Martin Doerr,
  • Mathias Brochhausen,
  • Hyoil Han
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 30 October 2008

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Check for updates

Author Tags

  1. information retrieval
  2. language modeling
  3. question answering
  4. statistical language modeling

Qualifiers

  • Research-article

Conference

CIKM08
CIKM08: Conference on Information and Knowledge Management
October 30, 2008
California, Napa Valley, USA

Upcoming Conference

CIKM '25

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)0
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0
Reflects downloads up to 17 Feb 2025

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all
  • (2022)A Systematic Literature Review of Question Answering: Research Trends, Datasets, MethodsComputational Science and Its Applications – ICCSA 2022 Workshops10.1007/978-3-031-10536-4_4(47-62)Online publication date: 4-Jul-2022
  • (2015)Supporting early contextualization of textual content in digital documents on the WebProceedings of the 2015 13th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR)10.1109/ICDAR.2015.7333926(1071-1075)Online publication date: 23-Aug-2015
  • (2009)Language Modeling Approaches to Information RetrievalJournal of Computing Science and Engineering10.5626/JCSE.2009.3.3.1433:3(143-164)Online publication date: 30-Sep-2009
  • (2009)Answer credibilityProceedings of Human Language Technologies: The 2009 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Companion Volume: Short Papers10.5555/1620853.1620897(157-160)Online publication date: 31-May-2009

View Options

Login options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Figures

Tables

Media

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media