Answering contextual questions based on ontologies and question templates

Abstract

Contextual question answering (CQA), in which user information needs are satisfied through an interactive question answering (QA) dialog, has recently attracted more research attention. One challenge is to fuse contextual information into the understanding process of relevant questions. In this paper, a discourse structure is proposed to maintain semantic information, and approaches for recognition of relevancy type and fusion of contextual information according to relevancy type are proposed. The system is evaluated on real contextual QA data. The results show that better performance is achieved than a baseline system and almost the same performance as when these contextual phenomena are resolved manually. A detailed evaluation analysis is presented.

Keywords

Contextual question answering (CQA) / ontology / question templates

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 60496326, 60573063 and 60573064)

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

2014 Higher Education Press and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg