The present paper investigates the issue of downtrends in different types of yes/no question in Estonian. The types that are compared comprise those beginning with an interrogative particle kas (whether), tag questions ending with the particle või (or), and morphosyntactically unmarked questions. It appears that these differ with respect to the slope of the fall in prenuclear accents and the st...

We present a method for automatically classifying consumer health questions. Our thirteen question types are designed to aid in the automatic retrieval of medical answers from consumer health resources. To our knowledge, this is the first machine learning-based method specifically for classifying consumer health questions. We demonstrate how previous approaches to medical question classificatio...

One useful way to find the answer to a question is to search a library of previously-answered questions. This is the idea behind FAQFinder, a Web-based natural language questionanswering system which uses Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) files to answer users’ questions. FAQFinder tries to answer a user’s question by retrieving a similar FAQ question, if one exists, and its answer. FAQFinder us...

The present paper compares the intonation of two question types in Estonian: tag questions (või-questions) and morphosyntactically unmarked questions. Measurements of accent peaks in controlled data revealed a significant difference in the nuclear pitch accent between the two types. This finding is interpreted with reference to work on questions in other languages.

Open-domain Question-Answering (QA) systems heavily rely on named entities, a set of general-purpose semantic types which generally cover names of persons, organizations and locations, dates and amounts, etc. If we are to build medical QA systems, a set of medically relevant named entities must be used. In this paper, we explore the use of the UMLS (Unified Medical Language System) Semantic Net...

The prosodic properties of distinct types of focus and wh-interrogatives are compared in Tokyo Japanese (TJ) and South Kyeongsang Korean (SKK). The results of a production study demonstrate that there are limited prosodic differences between the intonation patterns of Informational Focus (IF) and Contrastive Focus (CF) in both languages. Also, it is revealed that the intonational realization of...

The investigation presented in this paper is a novel method in question answering (QA) that enables a QA system to gain performance through reuse of information in the answer to one question to answer another related question. Our analysis shows that a pair of question in a general open domain QA can have embedding relation through their mentions of noun phrase expressions. We present methods f...