Multi-Dimensional Feature Merger for Question Answering

In this paper, we introduce new features for question-answering systems. These features are inspired by the fact that justification of the correct answer (out of many candidate answers) may be present in multiple passages. Our features attempt to combine evidence from multiple passages retrieved for a candidate answer. We present results on two data-sets: Jeopardy! and Doctor’s Dilemma. In both data-sets, our features are ranked highest in correlation with gold class (in the training data) and significantly improve the performance of our existing QA system, Watson.

[1]  Aditya Kalyanpur,et al.  Typing candidate answers using type coercion , 2012, IBM J. Res. Dev..

[2]  James Fan,et al.  Textual evidence gathering and analysis , 2012, IBM J. Res. Dev..

[3]  Jennifer Chu-Carroll,et al.  Finding needles in the haystack: Search and candidate generation , 2012, IBM J. Res. Dev..

[4]  Leonard Bolc,et al.  Natural language question answering systems , 1980 .

[5]  Mark A. Hall,et al.  Correlation-based Feature Selection for Discrete and Numeric Class Machine Learning , 1999, ICML.

[6]  Kevin Humphreys,et al.  New Directions in Question Answering , 2006, Information Retrieval.

[7]  Jennifer Chu-Carroll,et al.  Building Watson: An Overview of the DeepQA Project , 2010, AI Mag..

[8]  Sanda M. Harabagiu,et al.  Advances in Open Domain Question Answering , 2007 .

[9]  Siddharth Patwardhan,et al.  Question analysis: How Watson reads a clue , 2012, IBM J. Res. Dev..

[10]  Aditya Kalyanpur,et al.  A framework for merging and ranking of answers in DeepQA , 2012, IBM J. Res. Dev..

[11]  Ellen M. Voorhees,et al.  Building a question answering test collection , 2000, SIGIR '00.

[12]  Robert F. Simmons,et al.  Computational Linguistics Natural Language Question- Answering Systems: 1969 , 2022 .

[13]  Boris Katz,et al.  Syntactic and Semantic Decomposition Strategies for Question Answering from Multiple Resources * , 2005 .

[14]  Siddharth Patwardhan,et al.  Fact-based question decomposition in DeepQA , 2012, IBM J. Res. Dev..

[15]  Jennifer Chu-Carroll,et al.  Statistical source expansion for question answering , 2011, CIKM '11.