The backbone of the Pronto QA system is linguistically-principled: Combinatory Categorial Grammar is used to generate syntactic analyses of questions and potential answer snippets, and Discourse Representation Theory is employed as semantic formalism to match the meanings of questions and answers. The key idea of the Pronto system is to use semantics to prune answer candidates, thereby exploiti...

• What is Datalog± and what are its advantages? Datalog± is a rule-based formalism that combines the advantages of logic programming in Datalog with features for expressing ontological knowledge and advanced data modeling constraints. Datalog± provides a uniform framework for query answering and reasoning with incomplete data. It generalizes disparate other KR formalisms such as plain Datalog, ...

We present an approach to query expansion in answer retrieval that uses Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) techniques to bridge the lexical gap between questions and answers. SMT-based query expansion is done by i) using a full-sentence paraphraser to introduce synonyms in context of the entire query, and ii) by translating query terms into answer terms using a full-sentence SMT model traine...

Based on a previous analysis of the cognitive interactivity of movie viewing, this paper examines the circularity at the core of the gameplay experience. Taking the survival horror genre, and more particularly the game Cold Fear, as a case study, it describes the activity as a heuristic circle. If playing a videogame is stepping into a magic circle as Huizinga phrased it, it is also engaging in...

This work is about guiding the user web search by generating most relevant questions, answers and grammars from web documents. The proposed approach is based on the representation of the main domain concepts as a set of attributes and relating these attributes to the user models and to a syntactico-semantic taxonomy, that describes the general relationships between conceptual and linguistic kno...

This paper provides an overview of NTCIR-5 QAC3 (Question Answering Challenge 3). QAC is a series of challenges for evaluating question answering technologies in Japanese. QAC3 follows the same course as QAC based on the success of the previous two workshops, with its task limited to that corresponding to QAC2 Subtask 3 aiming at the convergence of research resources for novel subjects. This ta...

The data gathered during the pilot evaluations consisted of three components: (1) Video recordings capturing the modelling activities of two i:HTL students, their social interactions, questions and answers, analysed by using Transana (see Fig. 3 and 4); (2) Textual data, gathered by preand post-tests (to prove the change in content knowledge, Tab. 2) and analysed with the Atlas.ti (Fig. 5); (3)...

Some of the Follow-Up Questions (FU Q) that an Interactive Question Answering (IQA) system receives are not topic shifts, but rather continuations of the previous topic. In this paper, we propose an empirical framework to explore such questions, with two related goals in mind: (1) modeling the different relations that hold between the FU Q’s answer and either the FU Q or the preceding dialogue,...

Recently, websites employ online guides to help the users exploring required materials and information. The guides are presented through exchanging online questions and answers. For a foreign language visitor, website tour guides not only need to provide background and justification for the argument, but also they are better to translate the interaction. This paper presents an automated and int...