Pragmatic Query Answering: Results from a Quantitative Evaluation

This paper reports on an implementation of methods for generating indirect responses in question-answering dialogue based on domain-level strategic reasoning. User’s questions are interpreted as reflexes of underlying user requirements which are potentially satisfied by information beyond what is directly asked about. We find that the algorithms that reason about user requirements yield significantly shorter dialogues than a simpler baseline, and that users are able to interact with these systems in a pragmatically natural way.

[1]  R. Rooij,et al.  Optimal assertions, and what they implicate. A uniform game theoretic approach , 2007 .

[2]  Nancy Green,et al.  Generating Indirect Answers to Yes-No Questions , 1994, INLG.

[3]  Christopher Potts,et al.  Not a Simple Yes or No: Uncertainty in Indirect Answers , 2009, SIGDIAL Conference.

[4]  R. Rooij.  Questioning to resolve decision problems , 2003 .

[5]  Gerhard Weikum,et al.  YAGO2: exploring and querying world knowledge in time, space, context, and many languages , 2011, WWW.

[6]  Xuchen Yao,et al.  Freebase QA: Information Extraction or Semantic Parsing? , 2014, ACL 2014.

[7]  Staffan Larsson,et al.  Information state and dialogue management in the TRINDI dialogue move engine toolkit , 2000, Natural Language Engineering.

[8]  Joyce Chai,et al.  Discourse Structure for Context Question Answering , 2004, HLT-NAACL 2004.

[9]  C. Raymond Perrault,et al.  Analyzing Intention in Utterances , 1986, Artif. Intell..

[10]  David Traum,et al.  The Information State Approach to Dialogue Management , 2003 .

[11]  Véronique Moriceau.  Generating Intelligent Numerical Answers in a Question-Answering System , 2006, INLG.

[12]  Ronnie W. Smith,et al.  Current and New Directions in Discourse and Dialogue , 2004 .

[13]  Parke Godfrey,et al.  An overview of cooperative answering , 1992, Journal of Intelligent Information Systems.

[14]  Hans Uszkoreit,et al.  Contextual phenomena and thematic relations in database QA dialogues: results from a Wizard-of-Oz Experiment , 2006, HLT-NAACL 2006.

[15]  Oren Etzioni,et al.  Towards a theory of natural language interfaces to databases , 2003, IUI.