Architecture and evaluation of BRUJA, a multilingual question answering system

Cross language information retrieval (CLIR) is a retrieval process in which the user fires queries in one language to retrieve information from another (different) language. The diversity of information and language barriers are the serious issues for communication and cultural exchange across the world. To solve such barriers, Cross language information retrieval system, are nowadays in strong demand. CLIR is a subset of Information Retrieval (IR) system. Information Retrieval deals with finding useful information from a large collection of unstructured, structured and semi-structured data to a user query where the query is a set of keywords. Information Retrieval can be classified into different classes such as Monolingual information retrieval, Bi-Lingual Information Retrieval, Multilingual information retrieval and Cross language information retrieval. This paper focuses on the various IR variants and techniques used in CLIR system. Further, based on available literature, a number of challenges and issues in CLIR have been identified and discussed. It gives an overview of the advantages, limitations, tools available in CLIR research. It also describes new application areas of CLIR such as medical, multimedia, question answering system etc. The need for exploring and building more specialized information system that enable speakers of an Odia language to discover valuable information beyond linguistic and cultural barriers. This study is aimed at building an experimental CLIR system between one of the under-resourced language (i.e. Odia) and one of the most commonly used online language (i.e. English) in future.

As increasing numbers of non‐English resources have become available on the Web, the interesting and important issue of how Web users can retrieve documents in different languages has arisen. Cross‐language information retrieval (CLIR), the study of retrieving information in one language by queries expressed in another language, is a promising approach to the problem. Cross‐language information retrieval has attracted much attention in recent years. Most research systems have achieved satisfactory performance on standard Text REtrieval Conference (TREC) collections such as news articles, but CLIR techniques have not been widely studied and evaluated for applications such as Web portals. In this article, the authors present their research in developing and evaluating a multilingual English–Chinese Web portal that incorporates various CLIR techniques for use in the business domain. A dictionary‐based approach was adopted and combines phrasal translation, co‐occurrence analysis, and pre‐ and posttranslation query expansion. The portal was evaluated by domain experts, using a set of queries in both English and Chinese. The experimental results showed that co‐occurrence‐based phrasal translation achieved a 74.6% improvement in precision over simple word‐by‐word translation. When used together, pre‐ and posttranslation query expansion improved the performance slightly, achieving a 78.0% improvement over the baseline word‐by‐word translation approach. In general, applying CLIR techniques in Web applications shows promise.

Open-domain question answering is an emerging field of natural language processing. Application areas of question answering (QA) systems are increasing with the availability of new datasets, more powerful machines and easy access to voice-enabled devices that interact with humans in their daily lives. Users can get into interactions with QA systems without the need to be limited by any domain. However, there is still need for QA systems that can answer questions in a specific field such as international criminal law, violence of human rights or bill of rights. The recent approaches on open-domain question answering made it possible to extend open-domain QA systems towards specific fields. This paper presents Quill-QA, the new feature of the Quill Platform. Quill Platform is a web platform providing set of tools that digitize and visualize negotiated texts, any text in the form of formal negotiations. Quill-QA is based on Facebook's DrQA system and as a result it adopts a flexible Ranker-Reader architecture. Quill-QA answers questions addressed on the samples of negotiated texts such as U.S. Constitutional Convention of 1787, Utah State Constitutional Convention of 1895 and European Union Act 2017. Without limiting the scope of the input questions to a finite set of templates, Quill-QA is the first QA system that focuses on negotiated texts.

Information can also be a means of learning for humans. Including information about history because history can be a means of learning for the younger generation to appreciate the nation's culture and build national identity. In the past, the Sumedang Larang kingdom was one of the many kingdoms in West Java, Indonesia, that could be used as much information as a lesson. Technological developments make more and more information available for study. We need the proper means to find the information we need. This study aims to build a Question Answering (QA) system to create a means for the younger generation to be more familiar with the history of the kingdom in the past. The QA system offers an information retrieval system that is easy to access and can immediately provide the answers we need. This QA system was built using ontology as a knowledge base and cosine similarity to determine the similarity between user questions and the dataset. The QA system that has been built is tested by providing a set of questions so that the system's performance can be measured, and the results of system testing get a precision value of 70% and a recall value of 90%.

We present an approach to develop a Question Answering (QA) system over cooking recipes that makes use of Cooking Ontology management. QA systems are designed to satisfy the user’s specific information need whereas ontology is the conceptualization of knowledge and it exhibits the hierarchical structure. The system is an Information retrieval (IR) based system where the various tasks to be handled like question classification, answer pattern recognition, indexing, final answer generation. Our proposed QA System use Apache Lucene for document retrieval. All cooking related documents are indexed using Apache Lucene. Stop words are removed from each cooking related question and formed the query words which are identified to retrieve the most relevant document using Lucene. Relevant paragraphs are selected from the retrieved documents based on the tf-idf of the matching query words along with n-gram overlap of the paragraph with the original question. This paper also presents a way to develop an ontology model in such a way that the queries can be processed with the help of the ontology knowledge base and generate the exact answer.

This paper presents a study of the negative effect of Machine Translation (MT) on the precision of Cross---Lingual Question Answering (CL---QA). For this research, a English---Spanish Question Answering (QA) system is used. Also, the sets of 200 official questions from CLEF 2004 and 2006 are used. The CL experimental evaluation using MT reveals that the precision of the system drops around 30% with regard to the monolingual Spanish task. Our main contribution consists on a taxonomy of the identified errors caused by using MT and how the errors can be overcome by using our proposals. An experimental evaluation proves that our approach performs better than MT tools, at the same time contributing to this CL---QA system being ranked first at English---Spanish QA CLEF 2006.

A survey on textual entailment based question answering

Number of people having expertise in a certain domain is less than people who need information in that domain. In this situation, an automatic question answering (QA) system is necessary. Observing available manual QA sites on internet, the real world question that people usually ask have different expected answer type (EAT) compared to a common automatic QA. Addressing a case study of a religion domain which makes it a closed domain QA, we proposed the EAT into 6 types: LAW, DEFINITION, COMPARISON, METHOD, TIME and PERSON. Different with common QA approach, we built the QA system using case based approach which consists of two main components: Question Analyzer and Case Retriever. Related with the case based reasoning (CBR) framework, these two main components act as the Retrieve and Reuse process while the Revise and Retain process is handle by Case Retainer component. The QA system was built using available Indonesian Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools and FreeCBR as the CBR library. The experiments were done to calculate the accuracy and testing the system with unknown case. By using 77 cases collected from internet with assumption that all answers are available, the experiments achieved 97% accuracy. And by using 10 test cases for the unknown case, the similarity score calculated by the system showed that the test questions have no answer in the available case base.

In this paper we describe the application of our statistical pattern classification approach to question answering (QA) to the rapid development of monolingual QA systems. We show how the approach has been applied successfully to QA in English, Japanese, Chinese, Russian and Swedish to form the basis of our publicly accessible web-based multilingual QA system at http://asked.jp.

Previous works on evaluating the performance of Question Answering (QA) systems are focused on the evaluation of the precision. In this paper, we developed a mathematic procedure in order to explore new evaluation measures in QA systems considering the answer time. Also, we carried out an exercise for the evaluation of QA systems within a time constraint in the CLEF-2006 campaign, using the proposed measures. The main conclusion is that the evaluation of QA systems in realtime can be a new scenario for the evaluation of QA systems.

Question-Answering (QA) systems at the intersection of natural language processing, information retrieval, and knowledge representation aim to provide efficient responses to natural language queries. These systems have seen extensive development in English and languages like Indonesian present unique challenges and opportunities. This literature review paper delves into the state of ontology-based Indonesian QA systems, highlighting critical challenges. The first challenge lies in sentence understanding, variations, and complexity. Most systems rely on syntactic analysis and struggle to grasp sentence semantics. Complex sentences, especially in Indonesian, pose difficulties in parsing, semantic interpretation, and knowledge extraction. Addressing these linguistic intricacies is pivotal for accurate responses. Secondly, template-based SPARQL query construction, commonly used in Indonesian QA systems, suffers from semantic gaps and inflexibility. Advanced techniques like semantic matching algorithms and dynamic template generation can bridge these gaps and adapt to evolving ontologies. Thirdly, lexical gaps and ambiguity hinder QA systems. Bridging vocabulary mismatches between user queries and ontology labels remains a challenge. Strategies like synonym expansion, word embedding, and ontology enrichment must be explored further to overcome these challenges. Lastly, the review discusses the potential of developing multi-domain ontologies to broaden the knowledge coverage of QA systems. While this presents complex linguistic and ontological challenges, it offers the advantage of responding to various user queries across various domains. This literature review identifies crucial challenges in developing ontology-based Indonesian QA systems and suggests innovative approaches to address these challenges.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to build a better question answering (QA) system that can furnish more improved retrieval of answers related to COVID-19 queries from the COVID-19 open research data set (CORD-19). As CORD-19 has an up-to-date collection of coronavirus literature, text mining approaches can be successfully used to retrieve answers pertaining to all coronavirus-related questions. The existing a lite BERT for self-supervised learning of language representations (ALBERT) model is finetuned for retrieving all COVID relevant information to scientific questions posed by the medical community and to highlight the context related to the COVID-19 query.Design/methodology/approachThis study presents a finetuned ALBERT-based QA system in association with Best Match25 (Okapi BM25) ranking function and its variant BM25L for context retrieval and provided high scores in benchmark data sets such as SQuAD for answers related to COVID-19 questions. In this context, this paper has built a QA system, pre-trained on SQuAD and finetuned it on CORD-19 data to retrieve answers related to COVID-19 questions by extracting semantically relevant information related to the question.FindingsBM25L is found to be more effective in retrieval compared to Okapi BM25. Hence, finetuned ALBERT when extended to the CORD-19 data set provided accurate results.Originality/valueThe finetuned ALBERT QA system was developed and tested for the first time on the CORD-19 data set to extract context and highlight the span of the answer for more clarity to the user.

In recent years, medical Question Answering (QA) systems have gained a lot of attentions, since they can not only help professionals make quick decisions, but also give ordinary people advice when they seek for helpful information. However, the interpretability and accuracy problems have plagued QA systems for a long time. In this paper, we propose a QA system, DSQA, based on knowledge graph for answering domain-specific medical questions. The data we use are from Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) that are complex and heterogeneous with varied qualities. We introduce doctor-in-the-loop mechanism to design the knowledge graph, which improves the interpretability and the accuracy of our QA system. For every natural-language question, we generate the answer with a hybrid of the traditional deep learning model and the reasoning on the knowledge graph. Finally, the answer is returned to the user in the format of a subgraph with corresponding natural-language sentences. Our system shows high interpretability and gives excellent performance according to the experiment results.

Internet is one of the main sources for information which attracts million of users to find the answers for their questions. Finding the accurate answer of the question from giant databases or web pages is a very challenging task. Question answering systems answer the question from structured or unstructured databases. Question answering is different from the traditional ad-hoc document retrieval tasks in a way that in simple document search engine, the set of relevant documents are returned in response of the query, whereas, in the question answering systems the response of the query is the correct answer to what is asked. Finding the exact answer is more interesting and useful than getting a list of documents to look through and find the answer manually. Generally, the question classification is first phase in question answering systems. This phase reduces the answer space by pruning out the extra information that is irrelevant by finding out the expected answer type. This paper mainly focuses on Numeric type questions and also discusses briefly about the questions of type Entity and Location. Almost all the previous question classification algorithms evaluated their work by using the classes defined by Li and Roth [1]. The coarse grained class Numeric has fine grained class Other. In this paper, we target and present the mechanism to create new classes to replace the Other class in Numeric class. We present an automatic hierarchy creation method to add new class nodes using the knowledge resources and shallow language processing.

Datasets that boosted state-of-the-art solutions for Question Answering (QA) systems prove that it is possible to ask questions in natural language manner. However, users are still used to query-like systems where they type in keywords to search for answer. In this study we validate which parts of questions are essential for obtaining valid answer. In order to conclude that, we take advantage of LIME - a framework that explains prediction by local approximation. We find that grammar and natural language is disregarded by QA. State-of-the-art model can answer properly even if 'asked' only with a few words with high coefficients calculated with LIME. According to our knowledge, it is the first time that QA model is being explained by LIME.