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Joint question clustering and relevance prediction for open domain non-factoid question answering

Published: 07 April 2014 Publication History

Abstract

Web searches are increasingly formulated as natural language questions, rather than keyword queries. Retrieving answers to such questions requires a degree of understanding of user expectations. An important step in this direction is to automatically infer the type of answer implied by the question, e.g., factoids, statements on a topic, instructions, reviews, etc. Answer Type taxonomies currently exist for factoid-style questions, but not for open-domain questions. Building taxonomies for non-factoid questions is a harder problem since these questions can come from a very broad semantic space. A few attempts have been made to develop taxonomies for non-factoid questions, but these tend to be too narrow or domain specific. In this paper, we address this problem by modeling the Answer Type as a latent variable that is learned in a data-driven fashion, allowing the model to be more adaptive to new domains and data sets. We propose approaches that detect the relevance of candidate answers to a user question by jointly 'clustering' questions according to the hidden variable, and modeling relevance conditioned on this hidden variable.
In this paper we propose 3 new models: (a) Logistic Regression Mixture (LRM), (b) Glocal Logistic Regression Mixture (G-LRM) and (c) Mixture Glocal Logistic Regression Mixture (MG-LRM) that automatically learn question-clusters and cluster-specific relevance models. All three models perform better than a baseline relevance model that uses explicit Answer Type categories predicted by a supervised Answer-Type classifier, on a newsgroups dataset. Our models also perform better than a baseline relevance model that does not use any answer-type information on a blogs dataset.

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Published In

cover image ACM Other conferences
WWW '14: Proceedings of the 23rd international conference on World wide web
April 2014
926 pages
ISBN:9781450327442
DOI:10.1145/2566486

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  • IW3C2: International World Wide Web Conference Committee

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 07 April 2014

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Author Tags

  1. latent variable models
  2. question answering
  3. question clustering
  4. relevance prediction

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  • Research-article

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WWW '14
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  • IW3C2

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WWW '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 84 of 645 submissions, 13%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 1,899 of 8,196 submissions, 23%

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  • (2024)Advancements and Trends in Non-Factoid Question Answering: A Comprehensive Systematic Literature Review2024 International Conference on Science, Engineering and Business for Driving Sustainable Development Goals (SEB4SDG)10.1109/SEB4SDG60871.2024.10629871(1-17)Online publication date: 2-Apr-2024
  • (2022)A Non-Factoid Question-Answering TaxonomyProceedings of the 45th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval10.1145/3477495.3531926(1196-1207)Online publication date: 6-Jul-2022
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  • (2018)Inner Attention Based bi-LSTMs with Indexing for non-Factoid Question Answering2018 17th IEEE International Conference on Machine Learning and Applications (ICMLA)10.1109/ICMLA.2018.00009(1-7)Online publication date: Dec-2018
  • (2017)TOLA: Topic-oriented learning assistance based on cyber-physical system and big dataFuture Generation Computer Systems10.1016/j.future.2016.05.04075(200-205)Online publication date: Oct-2017
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  • (2015)Open Domain Question Answering via Semantic EnrichmentProceedings of the 24th International Conference on World Wide Web10.1145/2736277.2741651(1045-1055)Online publication date: 18-May-2015

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