A graph-based semi-supervised learning for question-answering

  • Authors:

  • Asli Celikyilmaz;Marcus Thint;Zhiheng Huang

  • Affiliations:

  • University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA;British Telecom (BT Americas), Jacksonville, FL;University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA

  • Venue:
  • ACL '09 Proceedings of the Joint Conference of the 47th Annual Meeting of the ACL and the 4th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing of the AFNLP: Volume 2 - Volume 2
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

We present a graph-based semi-supervised learning for the question-answering (QA) task for ranking candidate sentences. Using textual entailment analysis, we obtain entailment scores between a natural language question posed by the user and the candidate sentences returned from search engine. The textual entailment between two sentences is assessed via features representing high-level attributes of the entailment problem such as sentence structure matching, question-type named-entity matching based on a question-classifier, etc. We implement a semi-supervised learning (SSL) approach to demonstrate that utilization of more unlabeled data points can improve the answer-ranking task of QA. We create a graph for labeled and unlabeled data using match-scores of textual entailment features as similarity weights between data points. We apply a summarization method on the graph to make the computations feasible on large datasets. With a new representation of graph-based SSL on QA datasets using only a handful of features, and under limited amounts of labeled data, we show improvement in generalization performance over state-of-the-art QA models.