HITIQA: A Data Driven Approach to Interactive Question Answering: A Preliminary Report

HITIQA is an interactive question answering technology designed to allow intelligence analysts and other users of information systems to pose questions in natural language and obtain relevant, factual answers, or the assistance they require in order to perform their tasks. Furthermore, our objective in HITIQA is to allow the user to submit exploratory, analytical, nonfactual questions, such as “What has been Russia’s reaction to U.S. bombing of Kosovo?” HITIQA uses interactive natural language dialogue to score passages of the retrieved documents in relation to the query. The information obtained from this dialogue will aid the system in clarifying the user’s query, retrieving additional relevant documents and generating succinct answers to analytical questions. This paper will present a preliminary series of results and the results of a pilot evaluation by NIST.