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1 – 10 of over 128000
Article
Publication date: 10 February 2023

Huiyong Wang, Ding Yang, Liang Guo and Xiaoming Zhang

Intent detection and slot filling are two important tasks in question comprehension of a question answering system. This study aims to build a joint task model with some…

Abstract

Purpose

Intent detection and slot filling are two important tasks in question comprehension of a question answering system. This study aims to build a joint task model with some generalization ability and benchmark its performance over other neural network models mentioned in this paper.

Design/methodology/approach

This study used a deep-learning-based approach for the joint modeling of question intent detection and slot filling. Meanwhile, the internal cell structure of the long short-term memory (LSTM) network was improved. Furthermore, the dataset Computer Science Literature Question (CSLQ) was constructed based on the Science and Technology Knowledge Graph. The datasets Airline Travel Information Systems, Snips (a natural language processing dataset of the consumer intent engine collected by Snips) and CSLQ were used for the empirical analysis. The accuracy of intent detection and F1 score of slot filling, as well as the semantic accuracy of sentences, were compared for several models.

Findings

The results showed that the proposed model outperformed all other benchmark methods, especially for the CSLQ dataset. This proves that the design of this study improved the comprehensive performance and generalization ability of the model to some extent.

Originality/value

This study contributes to the understanding of question sentences in a specific domain. LSTM was improved, and a computer literature domain dataset was constructed herein. This will lay the data and model foundation for the future construction of a computer literature question answering system.

Details

Data Technologies and Applications, vol. 57 no. 5
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 2514-9288

Keywords

Open Access
Article
Publication date: 13 July 2021

Cheng Yi, Runge Zhu and Qi Wang

Question-answering (QA) systems are being increasingly applied in learning contexts. However, the authors’ understanding of the relationship between such tools and traditional QA…

2268

Abstract

Purpose

Question-answering (QA) systems are being increasingly applied in learning contexts. However, the authors’ understanding of the relationship between such tools and traditional QA channels remains limited. Focusing on question-answering learning activities, the current research investigates the effect of QA systems on students' learning processes and outcomes, as well as the interplay between two QA channels, that is, QA systems and communication with instructors.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors designed and implemented a QA system for two university courses, and collected data from questionnaires and system logs that recorded the interaction between students and the system throughout a semester.

Findings

The results show that using a QA system alone does not improve students' learning processes or outcomes. However, the use of a QA system significantly improves the positive effect of instructor communication.

Originality/value

This study contributes to the literature on learning and education technology, and provides practical guidance on how to incorporate QA tools in learning.

Details

Internet Research, vol. 32 no. 7
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1066-2243

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 30 August 2018

Yiming Zhao, Jin Zhang, Xue Xia and Taowen Le

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate Google question-answering (QA) quality.

2178

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate Google question-answering (QA) quality.

Design/methodology/approach

Given the large variety and complexity of Google answer boxes in search result pages, existing evaluation criteria for both search engines and QA systems seemed unsuitable. This study developed an evaluation criteria system for the evaluation of Google QA quality by coding and analyzing search results of questions from a representative question set. The study then evaluated Google’s overall QA quality as well as QA quality across four target types and across six question types, using the newly developed criteria system. ANOVA and Tukey tests were used to compare QA quality among different target types and question types.

Findings

It was found that Google provided significantly higher-quality answers to person-related questions than to thing-related, event-related and organization-related questions. Google also provided significantly higher-quality answers to where- questions than to who-, what- and how-questions. The more specific a question is, the higher the QA quality would be.

Research limitations/implications

Suggestions for both search engine users and designers are presented to help enhance user experience and QA quality.

Originality/value

Particularly suitable for search engine QA quality analysis, the newly developed evaluation criteria system expanded and enriched assessment metrics of both search engines and QA systems.

Details

Library Hi Tech, vol. 37 no. 2
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0737-8831

Keywords

Open Access
Article
Publication date: 24 June 2021

Haosen Liu, Youwei Wang, Xiabing Zhou, Zhengzheng Lou and Yangdong Ye

The railway signal equipment failure diagnosis is a vital element to keep the railway system operating safely. One of the most difficulties in signal equipment failure diagnosis…

Abstract

Purpose

The railway signal equipment failure diagnosis is a vital element to keep the railway system operating safely. One of the most difficulties in signal equipment failure diagnosis is the uncertainty of causality between the consequence and cause for the accident. The traditional method to solve this problem is based on Bayesian Network, which needs a rigid and independent assumption basis and prior probability knowledge but ignoring the semantic relationship in causality analysis. This paper aims to perform the uncertainty of causality in signal equipment failure diagnosis through a new way that emphasis on mining semantic relationships.

Design/methodology/approach

This study proposes a deterministic failure diagnosis (DFD) model based on the question answering system to implement railway signal equipment failure diagnosis. It includes the failure diagnosis module and deterministic diagnosis module. In the failure diagnosis module, this paper exploits the question answering system to recognise the cause of failure consequences. The question answering is composed of multi-layer neural networks, which extracts the position and part of speech features of text data from lower layers and acquires contextual features and interactive features of text data by Bi-LSTM and Match-LSTM, respectively, from high layers, subsequently generates the candidate failure cause set by proposed the enhanced boundary unit. In the second module, this study ranks the candidate failure cause set in the semantic matching mechanism (SMM), choosing the top 1st semantic matching degree as the deterministic failure causative factor.

Findings

Experiments on real data set railway maintenance signal equipment show that the proposed DFD model can implement the deterministic diagnosis of railway signal equipment failure. Comparing massive existing methods, the model achieves the state of art in the natural understanding semantic of railway signal equipment diagnosis domain.

Originality/value

It is the first time to use a question answering system executing signal equipment failure diagnoses, which makes failure diagnosis more intelligent than before. The EMU enables the DFD model to understand the natural semantic in long sequence contexture. Then, the SMM makes the DFD model acquire the certainty failure cause in the failure diagnosis of railway signal equipment.

Details

Smart and Resilient Transportation, vol. 3 no. 2
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 2632-0487

Keywords

Open Access
Article
Publication date: 9 December 2019

Zhengfa Yang, Qian Liu, Baowen Sun and Xin Zhao

This paper aims to make it convenient for those who have only just begun their research into Community Question Answering (CQA) expert recommendation, and for those who are…

2081

Abstract

Purpose

This paper aims to make it convenient for those who have only just begun their research into Community Question Answering (CQA) expert recommendation, and for those who are already concerned with this issue, to ease the extension of our understanding with future research.

Design/methodology/approach

In this paper, keywords such as “CQA”, “Social Question Answering”, “expert recommendation”, “question routing” and “expert finding” are used to search major digital libraries. The final sample includes a list of 83 relevant articles authored in academia as well as industry that have been published from January 1, 2008 to March 1, 2019.

Findings

This study proposes a comprehensive framework to categorize extant studies into three broad areas of CQA expert recommendation research: understanding profile modeling, recommendation approaches and recommendation system impacts.

Originality/value

This paper focuses on discussing and sorting out the key research issues from these three research genres. Finally, it was found that conflicting and contradictory research results and research gaps in the existing research, and then put forward the urgent research topics.

Details

International Journal of Crowd Science, vol. 3 no. 3
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 2398-7294

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 2 October 2017

Jui-Feng Yeh, Yu-Jui Huang and Kao-Pin Huang

This study aims to provide an ontology based Baysian network for clinical specialty supporting. As a knowledge base, ontology plays an essential role in domain applications…

Abstract

Purpose

This study aims to provide an ontology based Baysian network for clinical specialty supporting. As a knowledge base, ontology plays an essential role in domain applications especially in expert systems. Interactive question answering systems are suitable for personal domain consulting and recommended for real-time usage. Clinical specialty supporting for dispatching patients can assist hospitals to locate desired treatment departments for individuals relevant to their syndromes and disease efficiently and effectively. By referring to interactive question answering systems, individuals can understand how to alleviate time and medical resource wasting according to recommendations from medical ontology-based systems.

Design/methodology/approach

This work presents an ontology based on clinical specialty supporting using an interactive question answering system to achieve this aim. The ontology incorporates close temporal associations between words in input query to represent word co-occurrence relationships in concept space. The patterns defined in lexicon chain mechanism are further extracted from the query words to infer related concepts for treatment departments to retrieve information.

Findings

The precision and recall rates are considered as the criteria for model optimization. Finally, the inference-based interactive question answering system using natural language interface is adopted for clinical specialty supporting, and indicates its superiority in information retrieval over traditional approaches.

Originality/value

From the observed experimental results, we find the proposed method is useful in practice especially in treatment department decision supporting using metrics precision and recall rates. The interactive interface using natural language dialogue attracts the users’ attention and obtains a good score in mean opinion score measure.

Details

Engineering Computations, vol. 34 no. 7
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0264-4401

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 19 November 2018

Moritz Schubotz, Philipp Scharpf, Kaushal Dudhat, Yash Nagar, Felix Hamborg and Bela Gipp

This paper aims to present an open source math-aware Question Answering System based on Ask Platypus.

Abstract

Purpose

This paper aims to present an open source math-aware Question Answering System based on Ask Platypus.

Design/methodology/approach

The system returns as a single mathematical formula for a natural language question in English or Hindi. These formulae originate from the knowledge-based Wikidata. The authors translate these formulae to computable data by integrating the calculation engine sympy into the system. This way, users can enter numeric values for the variables occurring in the formula. Moreover, the system loads numeric values for constants occurring in the formula from Wikidata.

Findings

In a user study, this system outperformed a commercial computational mathematical knowledge engine by 13 per cent. However, the performance of this system heavily depends on the size and quality of the formula data available in Wikidata. As only a few items in Wikidata contained formulae when the project started, the authors facilitated the import process by suggesting formula edits to Wikidata editors. With the simple heuristic that the first formula is significant for the paper, 80 per cent of the suggestions were correct.

Originality/value

This research was presented at the JCDL17 KDD workshop.

Details

Information Discovery and Delivery, vol. 46 no. 4
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 2398-6247

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 29 November 2022

Yung-Ting Chuang and Ching-Hsien Wang

The purpose of this paper is to propose a mobile and social-based question-and-answer (Q&A) system that analyzes users' social relationships and past answering behavior, considers…

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to propose a mobile and social-based question-and-answer (Q&A) system that analyzes users' social relationships and past answering behavior, considers users' interest similarity and answer quality to infer suitable respondents and forwards the questions to users that are willing to give high quality answers.

Design/methodology/approach

This research applies first-order logic (FOL) inference calculation to generate question/interest ID that combines a users' social information, interests and social network intimacy to choose the nodes that can provide high-quality answers. After receiving a question, a friend can answer it, forward it to their friends according to the number of TTL (Time-to-Live) hops, or send the answer directly to the server. This research collected data from the TripAdvisor.com website and uses it for the experiment. The authors also collected previously answered questions from TripAdvisor.com; thus, subsequent answers could be forwarded to a centralized server to improve the overall performance.

Findings

The authors have first noticed that even though the proposed system is decentralized, it can still accurately identify the appropriate respondents to provide high-quality answers. In addition, since this system can easily identify the best answerers, there is no need to implement broadcasting, thus reducing the overall execution time and network bandwidth required. Moreover, this system allows users to accurately and quickly obtain high-quality answers after comparing and calculating interest IDs. The system also encourages frequent communication and interaction among users. Lastly, the experiments demonstrate that this system achieves high accuracy, high recall rate, low overhead, low forwarding cost and low response rate in all scenarios.

Originality/value

This paper proposes a mobile and social-based Q&A system that applies FOL inference calculation to analyze users' social relationships and past answering behavior, considers users' interest similarity and answer quality to infer suitable respondents and forwards the questions to users that are willing to give high quality answers. The experiments demonstrate that this system achieves high accuracy, high recall rate, low overhead, low forwarding cost and low response rate in all scenarios.

Article
Publication date: 4 July 2017

Shah Khusro, Aftab Alam and Shah Khalid

Social question and answer (SQA) site is one of the factors that boosted up and popularized the vision of social web. It enables community members to post highly valued answers to…

Abstract

Purpose

Social question and answer (SQA) site is one of the factors that boosted up and popularized the vision of social web. It enables community members to post highly valued answers to globally asked questions and information seekers to grab intellectual information in a contextual, concise, and meaningful format at the cost of investing a few minutes. The purpose of this paper is to present a common architecture, history, and a comprehensive review of such sites.

Design/methodology/approach

A critical and analytical investigation of the state-of-the-art SQA sites and relevant literature has been carried out with the intention to explore the noticeable features of such sites.

Findings

By studying relevant literature, and analysing a number of existing systems, a number of research challenges are identified and a generic architecture of SQA sites is contributed.

Practical implications

The review contributes a comprehensive knowledge about SQA systems and aims to be helpful to new researchers who want to get a broad picture of SQA systems on a single platform. The domain is in its infancy and requires tremendous efforts from the research community to explore its salient aspects with respect to the human world.

Originality/value

The study inspects SQA sites on a large scale and makes an original contribution by presenting a comprehensive review, future research challenges, and a generic architecture of SQA sites.

Article
Publication date: 1 December 2006

Jean‐Marc Robert, Lucie Moulet, Gonzalo Lizarralde, Colin H. Davidson, Jian‐Yun Nie and Lyne da Sylva

The construction sector is notorious for the dichotomy between its intensive use of information in its decision‐making processes and its limited access to, and insufficient use…

Abstract

The construction sector is notorious for the dichotomy between its intensive use of information in its decision‐making processes and its limited access to, and insufficient use of, the pertinent information that is potentially available, e.g. on the internet. This paper seeks to examine this issue. To solve this problem (the ‘problem of information aboutinformation’), a multidisciplinary team developed an online questionanswering (Q.‐A.)system that uses natural language for the query and the reply. The system provides a direct answer to questions posed by building industry participants, instead of providing a list of references (as is the case with most online information retrieval systems), much as if onewere asking a question of, and receiving a response from, an expert.It has the capabilitiesto process questions in natural language, to find appropriate fragments of answers indifferent web sites and to condense them into a paragraph, also written in natural language. The main features of the system are that it uses domain‐specific knowledge (in the form ofa hierarchical specialized thesaurus complemented by terms of fieldwork parlance),semantic categorization, a database of filtered and indexed web sites, and an online interface that is adapted to different profiles of actors in the construction sector. The testing process shows that the system goes beyond the lists of references and links provided by traditional search engines on the web.The Q.‐A.system already gives 70% of satisfactory answers. The Q.‐A.system can be applied to other business domains apart from information retrieval and decision‐making in the building sector. It is also possible to apply it to the exploitation of in‐house knowledge management database.

Details

Construction Innovation, vol. 6 no. 4
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1471-4175

Keywords

1 – 10 of over 128000