Document or passage retrieval is typically used as the first step in current question answering systems. The accuracy of the answer that is extracted from the passages and the efficiency of the question answering process will depend to some extent on the quality of this initial ranking. We show how language model approaches can be used to improve answer passage ranking. In particular, we show h...

Using elementary techniques, a question named after the famous Russian mathematician I. M. Gelfand is answered. This concerns the leading (i.e., most significant) digit in the decimal expansion of integers 2n, 3n, . . . , 9n . The history of this question, some of which is very recent, is reviewed.

Nagy's question is whether or not every power-bounded operator is similar to a contraction [3]. ("Power-bounded" means that the norms of the positive powers are bounded.) Foguel's answer is no [l]. The purpose of this note is to look at Foguel's ingenious counterexample from a point of view somewhat different from his own. The advantage of the new look is that it is less computational; its draw...

Passage-level question answer matching is a challenging task since it requires effective representations that capture the complex semantic relations between questions and answers. In this work, we propose a series of deep learning models to address passage answer selection. To match passage answers to questions accommodating their complex semantic relations, unlike most previous work that utili...

The paper presents an approach to answer extraction for a Question Answering Dialogue System (QADS), which is a part of an interactive quiz game. The information that forms the content of this game is concerned with biographical facts of famous people’s life. The facts are extracted from Wikipedia pages by means of semantic relations, whose fillers are identified by trained sequence classifiers...

Question and answer pairs in Community Question Answering (CQA) services are organized into hierarchical structures or taxonomies to facilitate users to find the answers for their questions conveniently. We observe that different CQA services have their own knowledge focus and used different taxonomies to organize their question and answer pairs in their archives. As there are no simple semanti...

We describe a "QUESTION-ANSWER" information system implemented on computer BESM-6 in the time-shared system. The "QUESTION-ANSWER" system is capable of deducing facts that have not been explicitly given to it by using a large data base and interpreting some of data as rules of inference. The system employs a special procedure which allows not to use contradictory information even if it is conta...

In The Sources of Normativity, Christine Korsgaard argues that in order to avoid the threat of moral skepticism, our moral theories must show how the claims they make about the nature of our actions obligate us to act morally. A theory that can justify the normativity of morality in this way answers what Korsgaard calls “the normative question.” Although Korsgaard claims that only Kantian theor...

This paper presents a novel answer summarization approach for community Question Answering services (cQAs) to address the problem of “incomplete answer”, i.e., missing valuable information from the “best answer” of a complex multi-sentence question, which can be obtained from other answers to the same question. Our method automatically generate a novel and non-redundant summary from cQA answers...