Implementation approaches for various categories of question answering system

An open domain question answering system is one of the emerging information retrieval systems available on the World Wide Web that is becoming popular day by day to get succinct and relevant answers in response of users' questions. The validation of the correctness of the answer is an important issue in the field of question answering. In this paper, we are proposing a World Wide Web based solution for answer validation where answers returned by open domain Question Answering Systems can be validated using online resources such as Wikipedia and Google. We have applied several heuristics for answer validation task and tested them against some popular World Wide Web based open domain Question Answering Systems over a collection of 500 questions collected from standard sources such as TREC, the Worldbook, and the Worldfactbook. We found that the proposed method is yielding promising results for automatic answer validation task.

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.

Given a user question, the goal of a Question Answering (QA) system is to retrieve answers rather than full documents or even best-matching passages, as most Information Retrieval systems currently do. In this paper, we present BRUJA, a QA system for the management of multilingual collections. BRUJ rkstions (English, Spanish and French). The BRUJA architecture is not formed with three monolingual QA systems but instead uses English as Interlingua to make usual QA tasks such as question classifications and answer extractions. In addition, BRUJA uses Cross Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) techniques to retrieve relevant documents from a multilingual collection. On the one hand, we have more documents to find answers from but on the other hand, we are introducing noise into the system because of translations to the Interlingua (English) and the CLIR module. The question is whether the difficulty of managing three languages is worth it or whether a monolingual QA system delivers better results. We report on in-depth experimentation and demonstrate that our multilingual QA system gets better results than its monolingual counterpart whenever it uses good translation resources and, especially, CLIR techniques that are state-of-the-art.

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.

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.

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%.

Question-answering systems are recognized as popular and frequently effective means of information seeking on the web. In such systems, information seekers can receive a concise response to their queries by presenting their questions in natural language. Interactive question answering is a recently proposed and increasingly popular solution that resides at the intersection of question answering and dialogue systems . On the one hand, the user can ask questions in normal language and locate the actual response to her inquiry; on the other hand, the system can prolong the question-answering session into a dialogue if there are multiple probable replies, very few, or ambiguities in the initial request. By permitting the user to ask more questions, interactive question answering enables users to interact with the system and receive more precise results dynamically. This survey offers a detailed overview of the interactive question-answering methods that are prevalent in current literature. It begins by explaining the foundational principles of question-answering systems, hence defining new notations and taxonomies to combine all identified works inside a unified framework. The reviewed published work on interactive question-answering systems is then presented and examined in terms of its proposed methodology, evaluation approaches, and dataset/application domain. We also describe trends surrounding specific tasks and issues raised by the community, so shedding light on the future interests of scholars. Our work is further supported by a GitHub page synthesizing all the major topics covered in this literature study. https://sisinflab.github.io/interactive-question-answering-systems-survey/

The Bloomberg Terminal is the leading source of information and news in the finance industry. Through hundreds of functions that provide access to a vast wealth of structured and semi-structured data, the terminal is able to satisfy a wide range of information needs. Users can find what they need by constructing queries, plotting charts, creating alerts, and so on. Until recently, most queries to the terminal were constructed through dedicated GUIs. For instance, if users wanted to screen for technology companies that met certain criteria, they would specify the criteria by filling out a form via a sequence of interactions with GUI elements such as drop-down lists, checkboxes, radio and toggle buttons, etc. To facilitate information retrieval in the terminal, we are equipping it with the ability to understand and answer queries expressed in natural language. Our QA (question answering) systems map structurally complex questions like the above to a logical meaning representation which can then be translated to an executable query language (such as SQL or SPARQL). At that point we can execute the queries against a suitable back end, obtain the results, and present them to the users. Adding a natural-language interface to a data repository introduces usability challenges of its own, chief amongst them being this: How can the user know what the system can and cannot understand and answer (without needing to undergo extensive training)? We can unpack this question into two separate parts: 1) How can we convey the full range of the system's abilities? 2) How can we convey its limitations? We use auto-complete as a tool to help meet both challenges. Specifically, the first question pertains to the general issue of discoverability: We want at least some of the suggested completions to act as vehicles for discovering data and functionality of which users may have not been previously aware. The second question pertains to expectation management. Naturally, no QA system can attain perfect performance; limiting factors include representational shortcomings and various kinds of incompleteness of the underlying data sources, as well as NLP technology limitations. We want to stop generating completions as a signal indicating that we are not able to understand and/or answer what is being typed.

A survey on question answering systems with classification

The Sumedang Larang Kingdom is one of the kingdoms in Indonesia which was founded by Prabu Tajimalela in 721 AD. The Sumedang Larang Kingdom is known as the national history of Indonesia. Still, most of the current generation does not know the history of the Sumedang Larang Kingdom, especially the younger generation. Therefore, we developed a question-and-answer system to seek information about the Sumedang Larang Kingdom. With the development of information technology, research on question answering systems is applied to research on Biomedical Questions to produce correct answers. Our system will help literacy about the Sumedang Larang Kingdom for the younger generation, especially students, and increase Indonesian cultural assets. The QA system aims to generate and provide precise short answers to user questions by automatically using information extraction and natural language processing methods. To collect and create questions, we use the concept of ontology. In addition, we use the Natural Language Naïve Bayes method to answer user questions. We built a QA system that can help students find information about the history of the Sumedang Larang Kingdom. Based on the accuracy of the results of testing the method we propose. In our evaluation, we involve the Decision Tree method as the base model. We note that the accuracy of the Naïve Bayes method is higher than that of the Decision Tree. The accuracy result of Naïve Bayes at the ratio of 8:2 and 7:3 is 67%, while the Decision Tree is only 56%.

Question answering (QA) systems, which source answers to natural language questions from Semantic Web data, have recently shifted from the research realm to become commercially viable products. Increasing investments have refined an interaction paradigm that allows end users to profit from the expressive power of Semantic Web standards, while at the same time hiding their complexity behind intuitive and easy-to-use interfaces. Not surprisingly, after the first excitement we did not witness a cooling-down phenomenon: regular interactions with question answering systems have become more and more natural. As consumers expectations around the capabilities of systems able to answer questions formulated in natural language keep growing, so is the availability of such systems in various settings, devices and languages. Increasing usage in real (non-experimental) settings have boosted the demand for resilient systems, which can cope with high volume demand.

Recently, there has been an upsurge in the number of knowledge graphs (KG) that can only be accessed by experts. Non-expert users lack an adequate understanding of the queried knowledge graph's vocabulary and structure, as well as the syntax of the structured query language used to express the user's information needs. To increase the user base of these KGs, a set of Question Answering (QA) systems that use natural language to query these knowledge graphs have been introduced. However, finding a benchmark that accurately evaluates the quality of a QA system is a difficult task due to (1) the high degree of variation in the fine-grained properties among the existing benchmarks, (2) the static nature of the existing benchmarks versus the evolving nature of KGs, and (3) the limited number of KGs targeted by existing benchmarks, which hinders the usability of QA systems in real-world deployment over KGs that are different from those that were used in the evaluation of the QA systems. In this paper, we introduce Maestro, a benchmark generation system for question answering over knowledge graphs. Maestro can generate a new benchmark for any KG given the KG and, optionally, a text corpus that covers this KG. The benchmark generated by Maestro is guaranteed to cover all the properties of the natural language questions and queries that were encountered in the literature as long as the targeted KG includes these properties. Maestro also generates high-quality natural language questions with various utterances that are on par with manually-generated ones to better evaluate QA systems.

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.

This paper presents a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system for question answering over the set of documents of a public tender. The proof-of-concept chatbot is intended to provide support to officers participating in the evaluation process of a tender whose documents are indexed. The system implements a dual-mode retrieval strategy —supporting both semantic and lexical search— to extract relevant context and uses an instruction-following language model to generate grounded responses based strictly on the retrieved information. The system is designed to assist officers in exploring tenders, evaluation reports, and award justifications through natural language queries. In order to assess the system, the documents of a tender have been generated symtheticly. Qualitative testing demonstrated that the system provided accurate, verifiable answers, avoiding unsupported inferences. The architecture emphasizes document fidelity, interpretability, and usability for non-technical users involved in procurement oversight. Future work may extend the framework to support the identification of fraud-related patterns.

Question Answering Systems (QAS) are tools to retrieve precise answers for user questions from a large set of text documents. Researchers from information retrieval and natural language processing community have put tremendous efforts to improve the performance of QASs across several languages. However, Hindi, the fourth most spoken language has not seen a proportional development in the field of question answering to an extent that information seekers accept QASs as a good alternative of search engines. In this chapter, a pipelined architecture for the development of QASs has been explained in the context of English and Hindi languages. This chapter also reviews the developments taking place in Hindi QASs while explaining the challenges faced by researchers in developing Hindi QASs. To encourage and support the new researchers in conducting researches in Hindi QASs, a list of techniques, tools and linguistic resources required to implement the components of a QAS are described in this chapter in a simple and persuasive manner. Finally, the future directions for research in Hindi QASs have been proposed.