tailieunhanh - Báo cáo khoa học: "Towards Conversational QA: Automatic Identification of Problematic Situations and User Intent ∗"

To enable conversational QA, it is important to examine key issues addressed in conversational systems in the context of question answering. In conversational systems, understanding user intent is critical to the success of interaction. Recent studies have also shown that the capability to automatically identify problematic situations during interaction can significantly improve the system performance. Therefore, this paper investigates the new implications of user intent and problematic situations in the context of question answering. . | Towards Conversational QA Automatic Identification of Problematic Situations and User Intent Joyce Y. Chai Chen Zhang Tyler Baldwin Department of Computer Science and Engineering Michigan State University East Lansing MI 48824 jchai zhangch6 baldwi96 @ Abstract To enable conversational QA it is important to examine key issues addressed in conversational systems in the context of question answering. In conversational systems understanding user intent is critical to the success of interaction. Recent studies have also shown that the capability to automatically identify problematic situations during interaction can significantly improve the system performance. Therefore this paper investigates the new implications of user intent and problematic situations in the context of question answering. Our studies indicate that in basic interactive QA there are different types of user intent that are tied to different kinds of system performance . problematic error free situations . Once users are motivated to find specific information related to their information goals the interaction context can provide useful cues for the system to automatically identify problematic situations and user intent. 1 Introduction Interactive question answering QA has been identified as one of the important directions in QA research Burger et al. 2001 . One ultimate goal is to support intelligent conversation between a user and a QA system to better facilitate user information needs. However except for a few systems that use dialog to address complex questions Small et al. 2003 Harabagiu et al. 2005 the general dialog capabilities have been lacking in most ques This work was partially supported by IIS-0347548 from the National Science Foundation. tion answering systems. To move towards conversational QA it is important to examine key issues relevant to conversational systems in the context of interactive question answering. This paper focuses on two issues related to conversational .