tailieunhanh - Báo cáo khoa học: "Interactive Question-Answering for Real-World Environments"

This paper describes F ERRET, an interactive question-answering (Q/A) system designed to address the challenges of integrating automatic Q/A applications into real-world environments. F ERRET utilizes a novel approach to Q/A – known as predictive questioning – which attempts to identify the questions (and answers) that users need by analyzing how a user interacts with a system while gathering information related to a particular scenario. | Ferret Interactive Question-Answering for Real-World Environments Andrew Hickl Patrick Wang John Lehmann and Sanda Harabagiu Language Computer Corporation 1701 North Collins Boulevard Richardson Texas 75080 USA ferret@ Abstract This paper describes Ferret an interactive question-answering Q A system designed to address the challenges of integrating automatic Q A applications into real-world environments. Ferret utilizes a novel approach to Q A - known as predictive questioning - which attempts to identify the questions and answers that users need by analyzing how a user interacts with a system while gathering information related to a particular scenario. 1 Introduction As the accuracy of today s best factoid questionanswering Q A systems Harabagiu et al. 2005 Sun et al. 2005 approaches 70 research has begun to address the challenges of integrating automatic Q A systems into real-world environments. A new class of applications - known as interactive Q A systems - are now being developed which allow users to ask questions in the context of extended dialogues in order to gather information related to any number of complex scenarios. In this paper we describe our interactive Q A system - known as Ferret - which uses an approach based on predictive questioning in order to meet the changing information needs of users over the course of a Q A dialogue. Answering questions in an interactive setting poses three new types of challenges for traditional Q A systems. First since current Q A systems are designed to answer single questions in isolation interactive Q A systems must look for ways to foster interaction with a user throughout all phases of the research process. Unlike traditional Q A applications interactive Q A systems must do more than cooperatively answer a user s single question. Instead in order to keep a user collaborating with the system interactive Q A systems need to provide access to new types of information that are somehow relevant to