Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques, Second Edition (Morgan Kaufmann Series in Data Management Systems)
Splitting complex temporal questions for question answering systems
ACL '04 Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics
Semantic Decomposition for Question Answering
Proceedings of the 2008 conference on ECAI 2008: 18th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Special questions and techniques
IBM Journal of Research and Development
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Factoid questions often contain one or more assertions (facts) about their answers. However, existing question-answering (QA) systems have not investigated how the multiple facts may be leveraged to enhance system performance. We argue that decomposing complex factoid questions can benefit QA, as an answer candidate is more likely to be correct if multiple independent facts support it. We categorize decomposable questions as parallel or nested, depending on processing strategy required. We present a novel decomposition framework---for parallel and nested questions---which can be overlaid on top of traditional QA systems. It contains decomposition rules for identifying fact sub-questions, a question-rewriting component and a candidate re-ranker. In a particularly challenging domain for our baseline QA system, our framework shows a statistically significant improvement in end-to-end QA performance.