Improving QA Accuracy by Question Inversion

This paper demonstrates a conceptually simple but effective method of increasing the accuracy of QA systems on factoid-style questions. We define the notion of an inverted question, and show that by requiring that the answers to the original and inverted questions be mutually consistent, incorrect answers get demoted in confidence and correct ones promoted. Additionally, we show that lack of validation can be used to assert no-answer (nil) conditions. We demonstrate increases of performance on TREC and other question-sets, and discuss the kinds of future activities that can be particularly beneficial to approaches such as ours.

[1]  Dan I. Moldovan,et al.  Lexical Chains for Question Answering , 2002, COLING.

[2]  Terry Winograd,et al.  Procedures As A Representation For Data In A Computer Program For Understanding Natural Language , 1971 .

[3]  David H. D. Warren,et al.  An Efficient Easily Adaptable System for Interpreting Natural Language Queries , 1982, CL.

[4]  Ian Witten,et al.  Data Mining , 2000 .

[5]  Douglas B. Lenat,et al.  CYC: a large-scale investment in knowledge infrastructure , 1995, CACM.

[6]  J. Prager.  A Curriculum-Based Approach to a QA Roadmap , 2002 .

[7]  Ellen M. Voorhees,et al.  Overview of the TREC 2004 Novelty Track. , 2005 .

[8]  Veronique Moriceau.  Numerical Data Integration for Cooperative Question-Answering , 2006 .

[9]  Ian H. Witten,et al.  Data mining: practical machine learning tools and techniques, 3rd Edition , 1999 .

[10]  Vasile Rus,et al.  Logic Form Transformation of WordNet and its Applicability to Question Answering , 2001, ACL.

[11]  Charles L. A. Clarke,et al.  Question Answering by Passage Selection (MultiText Experiments for TREC-9) , 2000, TREC.

[12]  Jennifer Chu-Carroll,et al.  Question Answering Using Constraint Satisfaction: QA-By-Dossier-With-Contraints , 2004, ACL.

[13]  George A. Miller,et al.  WordNet: A Lexical Database for English , 1995, HLT.

[14]  Jennifer Chu-Carroll,et al.  A Multi-Strategy and Multi-Source Approach to Question Answering , 2002, TREC.

[15]  Gary G. Hendrix,et al.  Developing a natural language interface to complex data , 1977, TODS.

[16]  Dragomir R. Radev,et al.  Ranking suspected answers to natural language questions using predictive annotation , 2000, ANLP.

[17]  Susan T. Dumais,et al.  An Analysis of the AskMSR Question-Answering System , 2002, EMNLP.