P(typequestion).pptVIP

Question Answering Gideon Mann Johns Hopkins University gsm@cs.jhu.edu Information Retrieval Tasks Retired General Wesley Clark How old is General Clark? How long did Clark serve in the military? Will Clark run for President? Ad-Hoc Queries Prior work has been concerned mainly with answering ad-hoc queries : General Clark Typically a few words long, not an entire question What is desired is general information about the subject in question Answering Ad-Hoc Queries Main focus of Information Retrieval past 2-3 decades Solution(s) : Vector-based methods SVD, query expansion, language modeling Return a page as an answer Resulting systems Extremely Useful Google, Altavista Traditional IR But not all queries are Ad-Hoc! How old is General Clark? Does not fit well into an Ad-hoc paradigm “How” and “is” are not relevant for appropriate retrieval Potentially useful cues in the question are ignored in traditional ad-hoc retrieval system Documents are not Facts Traditional IR systems return Pages Useful when only a vague information need has been identified Insufficient when a fact is desired: How old is General Clark? 58 How long did Clark serve in the mililary? 36 years Will Clark run for president? Maybe Question Answering as Retrieval Given a document collection and a question: A question answering system should retrieve a short snippet of text which exactly answer the question asked. Question Answering QA as a Comprehension Task For perfect recall, the answer only has to appear once in the collection. In essence, this forces the QA system to function as a text understanding system Thus QA may be interesting, not only for retrieval, but also to test understanding QA as a stepping stone Current QA focused on Fact extraction Answers appear verbatim in text How old is General Clark? How can we answer questions which don’t appear exactly in the text? How long has Clark been in the military? Will Clark run for President? Maybe build on low-level QA e