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Parallel and nested decomposition for factoid questions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 October 2013

BRANIMIR BOGURAEV ,
SIDDHARTH PATWARDHAN ,
ADITYA KALYANPUR ,
JENNIFER CHU-CARROLL  and
ADAM LALLY
BRANIMIR BOGURAEV
Affiliation:
IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, 1101 Kitchawan Road, Yorktown Heights, NY 10598. USA e-mail: bran@us.ibm.com, siddharth@us.ibm.com, adityakal@us.ibm.com, jencc@us.ibm.com, alally@us.ibm.com
SIDDHARTH PATWARDHAN
Affiliation:
IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, 1101 Kitchawan Road, Yorktown Heights, NY 10598. USA e-mail: bran@us.ibm.com, siddharth@us.ibm.com, adityakal@us.ibm.com, jencc@us.ibm.com, alally@us.ibm.com
ADITYA KALYANPUR
Affiliation:
IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, 1101 Kitchawan Road, Yorktown Heights, NY 10598. USA e-mail: bran@us.ibm.com, siddharth@us.ibm.com, adityakal@us.ibm.com, jencc@us.ibm.com, alally@us.ibm.com
JENNIFER CHU-CARROLL
Affiliation:
IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, 1101 Kitchawan Road, Yorktown Heights, NY 10598. USA e-mail: bran@us.ibm.com, siddharth@us.ibm.com, adityakal@us.ibm.com, jencc@us.ibm.com, alally@us.ibm.com
ADAM LALLY
Affiliation:
IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, 1101 Kitchawan Road, Yorktown Heights, NY 10598. USA e-mail: bran@us.ibm.com, siddharth@us.ibm.com, adityakal@us.ibm.com, jencc@us.ibm.com, alally@us.ibm.com
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Abstract

Typically, automatic Question Answering (QA) approaches use the question in its entirety in the search for potential answers. We argue that decomposing complex factoid questions into separate facts about their answers is beneficial to QA, since an answer candidate with support coming from multiple independent facts is more likely to be the correct one. We broadly categorize decomposable questions as parallel or nested, and we present a novel question decomposition framework for enhancing the ability of single-shot QA systems to answer complex factoid questions. Essential to the framework are components for decomposition recognition, question rewriting, and candidate answer synthesis and re-ranking. We discuss the interplay among these, with particular emphasis on decomposition recognition, a process which, we argue, can be sufficiently informed by lexico-syntactic features alone. We validate our approach to decomposition by implementing the framework on top of IBM Watson™, a state-of-the-art QA system, and showing a statistically significant improvement over its accuracy.

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Articles
Information
Natural Language Engineering , Volume 20 , Issue 4 , October 2014 , pp. 441 - 468
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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