This paper proposes a novel neural machine reading model for open-domain question answering at scale. Existing machine comprehension models typically assume that a short piece of relevant text containing answers is already identified and given to the models, from which the models are designed to extract answers. This assumption, however, is not realistic for building a large-scale open-domain q...

In this paper, we describe the system we used for the Tac-2008 Question Answering track. Our Rigid question answerer uses a classification method to group candidate answers into relevant and irrelevant classes based on the co-occurrence information of each pair of candidate answers. To answer Squishy types of questions, our system extracts from Wikipedia articles a list of interest-marking term...

Community question answering platforms have large repositories of previously answered questions. Reusing the answers for new questions is tempting. However, not all stored answers will still be relevant. We define a new and challenging problem concerning the sustainability of questions, and present metrics aimed at distinguishing between sustainable and non-sustainable questions. We find that a...

Query Personalization is the process of dynamically enhancing a query with related user preferences stored in a user profile with the aim of providing personalized answers. The underlying idea is that different users may find different things relevant to a search due to different preferences. Essential ingredients of query personalization are: (a) a model for representing and storing preference...

A database system may not always return answers for a query. Such a query is called a failing query. Under normal circumstances, an empty answer would be returned in response to such queries. Cooperative query answering systems produce generalized and relevant answers when an exact answer does not exist, by enhancing the query scope and including a broader range of information. Such systems may...

Challenges in answering queries over Web-accessible sources are selecting the sources that must be accessed and computing answers efficiently. Both tasks become more difficult when there is overlap among sources and when sources may return answers of varying quality. The objective is to obtain the best answers while minimizing the costs or delay in computing these answers and is similar to solv...

Group work is frequently part of idea generation, despite evidence that group interaction may reduce productivity during brainstorming sessions. Idea quantity is one aspect of creativity, but the originality of ideas generated is also important. In this paper, we examine how different aspects of group interaction, such as who makes the most contributions to an idea and the number of group membe...

Elementary Classes: Some Answers,

We present new methods to efficiently answer complex queries over biomedical ontologies and databases considering the relevant parts of these knowledge resources, and to generate shortest explanations to justify these answers. Both algorithms rely on the high-level representation and efficient solvers of Answer Set Programming. We apply these algorithms to find answers and explanations to some ...

This paper describes a full data-driven system for question answering. The system uses pattern matching and statistical techniques to identify the relevant passages as well as the candidate answers for factoid and definition questions. Since it does not consider any sophisticated linguistic analysis of questions and answers, it can be applied to different languages without requiring major adapt...