We describe a machine learning centered approach to developing an open domain question answering system. The system was developed in the summer of 2002, building upon several existing machine learning based NLP modules developed within a unified framework. Both queries and data were pre-processed and augmented with pos tagging, shallow parsing information, and some level of semantic categorizat...

We describe research centering on the statistical analysis of WHquestions. This work is motivated by the long-term goal of enhancing the performance of information retrieval systems. We identified informational goals associated with users’ queries posed to an Internet resource, and built a statistical model which infers these informational goals from shallow linguistic features of user queries....

Attention checks detect inattentiveness by instructing respondents to perform a specific task. However, while may correctly process the task, they choose not comply with instructions. We investigated issue of noncompliance in attention two web surveys. In Study 1, we measured respondents’ attitudes toward and their self-reported compliance. 2, experimentally varied reasons given for conducting ...

The objective of the Unisys Spoken Language Systems effort is to develop and demonstra te technology for the understanding of goal-directed spontaneous speech. The Unisys spoken language architecture couples speech recognition systems with the Unisys discourse understanding system, PUNDIT. PUNDIT is a broad-coverage language understanding system used in a variety of message understanding applic...

While digital assistants are increasingly used to help with various productivity tasks, less attention has been paid employing them in the domain of business documents. To build an agent that can handle users' information needs this domain, we must first understand types assistance users desire when working on their In work, present results from two user studies characterize and queries authors...