Question and Answer Tools

Hi again, When you’ve got a question and no clue about the answer, you always ask the internet.But where do you start? For the  majority of our questions we use Google. It’s simple, fast, and most of all it’s very effective. Nevertheless, there are another not so well known solutions: Stack Exchange Stack Exchange is [...]

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Context & Question and Answering systems

Hi everyone! So, I’ve been working since a couple of days on a new feature for Question and Answering systems regarding context. The main idea is to keep the topic of discussion from one user, so that he can be able to query the QA system with shortened questions. Here is an example scenario: What is [...]

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NLP Interaction: Intelligent Referencing

The systems mentioned in the previous posts have some of the characteristics of a natural language system suited for device control but are missing others. Speech graffiti and the multi-modal systems provide the user with convenient ways to identify the objects within the environment to be controlled. In the Bucks example on the other hand, [...]

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OpenEphyra – Question Interpretation – PART II

Ephyra knows about 70 properties DATE of an event, the NAME of a person or organization, etc . Each property is associated with a number of frequent question patterns. These patterns are basically regular expressions but in addition, they contain exactly one target tag <T>, indicating the target of the question, and 0 to n [...]

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OpenEphyra – Question Interpretation – PART I

In Exploring OpenEphyra – Query Generation, was given a small overview about  OpenEphyra’s Question Generation Model. In the last days I was exploring the framework, and reading some papers about it. After some experiments I got the first results, which made me very impressed. Let’s see more details … OpenEphyra is based on the  assumption [...]

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Exploring OpenEphyra – Query Generation

OpenEphyra has different steps/processes to “understand” a question. At first the question string is normalized – unnecessary tokens, stem verbs and nouns are dropped. The Question Normalizer then determines the expected answer type of question and interprets the question to create a more concise representation of the question string. Given this information, a set of [...]

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Qall-me

Here is a real implementation on a question and answering system, with practical use for the community. Basically, you could use your phone as a query terminal, and perform questions like: “Where can I see a movie tonight?”. Demo of the application: From the website: “…The potential of open domain QA will be experimented with [...]

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Question Answering systems & Genetic Algorithms

Tiedemann (2007), wrote an interesting paper about Genetic Algorithms, regarding how to improve passage retrieval in Question Answering systems. In this paper four selection strategies in evolutionary optimization of information retrieval (IR) in a question answering system are compared. The IR index has been enhanced by linguistic features to improve the retrieval performance of potential [...]

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Tools: OpenEphyra Question Answering System

OpenEphyra is the first open framework for question answering (QA). It retrieves accurate answers to natural language questions from the Web and other sources. OpenEphyra is hosted at SourceForge and published under the GNU General Public License (GPL). The framework comes with implementations of a number of algorithms that proved effective in CMU’s Ephyra system, [...]

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Documents Collection – Wanted dead or alive!

Anyone knows a large and free document corpus to test Question and Answering Information Retrieval Systems? Something TREC-like! Unfortunately, TREC collection of documents requires a password in order to download the documents. In fact, it would be nice if I could get a documents set from one specific topic (e.g. retail business). Moreover, it would [...]

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