Designing an interactive open-domain question answering system

TY - JOUR

T1 - Designing an interactive open-domain question answering system

AU - Quarteroni, S.

AU - Manandhar, S.

PY - 2009/1

Y1 - 2009/1

N2 - Interactive question answering (QA), where a dialogue interface enables follow-up and clarification questions, is a recent although long-advocated field of research. We report on the design and implementation of YourQA, our open-domain, interactive QA system. YourQA relies on a Web search engine to obtain answers to both fact-based and complex questions, such as descriptions and definitions. We describe the dialogue moves and management model making YourQA interactive, and discuss the architecture, implementation and evaluation of its chat-based dialogue interface. Our Wizard-of-Oz study and final evaluation results show how the designed architecture can effectively achieve open-domain, interactive QA.

AB - Interactive question answering (QA), where a dialogue interface enables follow-up and clarification questions, is a recent although long-advocated field of research. We report on the design and implementation of YourQA, our open-domain, interactive QA system. YourQA relies on a Web search engine to obtain answers to both fact-based and complex questions, such as descriptions and definitions. We describe the dialogue moves and management model making YourQA interactive, and discuss the architecture, implementation and evaluation of its chat-based dialogue interface. Our Wizard-of-Oz study and final evaluation results show how the designed architecture can effectively achieve open-domain, interactive QA.

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=57649119876&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1017/S1351324908004919

DO - 10.1017/S1351324908004919

M3 - Article

SN - 1351-3249

VL - 15

SP - 73

EP - 95

JO - Natural language engineering

JF - Natural language engineering

IS - 1

ER -