Context Fusion: The Role of Discourse Structure and Centering Theory

Questions are not asked in isolation. Their context, viz. the preceding interactions, might be of help to understand them and retrieve the correct answer. Previous research in Interactive Question Answering showed that context fusion has a big potential to improve the performance of answer retrieval. In this paper, we study how much context, and what elements of it, should be considered to answer Follow-Up Questions (FU Qs). Following previous research, we exploit Logistic Regression Models to learn aspects of dialogue structure relevant to answering FU Qs. We enrich existing models based on shallow features with deep features, relying on the theory of discourse structure of (Chai and Jin, 2004), and on Centering Theory, respectively. Using models trained on realistic IQA data, we show which of the various theoretically motivated features hold up against empirical evidence. We also show that, while these deep features do not outperform the shallow ones on their own, an IQA system’s answer correctness increases if the shallow and deep features are combined.