基于互联网的中文问答系统

搜索引擎(如Google等)返回的是与用户查询相关的文档集，并不是所提出的问题的答案。该文提出了一个基于互联网的中文问答系统，用来增强已有的搜索引擎的功能，使它们能够支持自然语言的回答。     

Experimenting with a Question Answering System for the Arabic Language

The World Wide Web (WWW) today is so vast that it has become more and more difficult to find answers to questions using standard search engines. Current search engines can return ranked lists of documents, but they do not deliver direct answers to the user. The goal of Open Domain Question Answering (QA) systems is to take a natural language question, understand the meaning of the question, and present a short answer as a response based on a repository of information. In this paper we present QARAB, a QA system that combines techniques from Information Retrieval and Natural Language Processing. This combination enables domain independence. The system takes natural language questions expressed in the Arabic language and attempts to provide short answers in Arabic. To do so, it attempts to discover what the user wants by analyzing the question and a variety of candidate answers from a linguistic point of view.     

A logical representation of Arabic questions toward automatic passage extraction from the Web

With the expanding growth of Arabic electronic data on the web, extracting information, which is actually one of the major challenges of the question-answering, is essentially used for building corpus of documents. In fact, building a corpus is a research topic that is currently referred to among some other major themes of conferences, in natural language processing (NLP), such as, information retrieval (IR), question-answering (QA), automatic summary (AS), etc. Generally, a question-answering system provides various passages to answer the user questions. To make these passages truly informative, this system needs access to an underlying knowledge base; this requires the construction of a corpus. The aim of our research is to build an Arabic question-answering system. In addition, analyzing the question must be the first step. Next, it is essential to retrieve a passage from the web that can serve as an appropriate answer. In this paper, we propose a method to analysis the question and retrieve the passage answer in the Arabic language. For the question analysis, five factual question types are processed. Additionally, our purpose is to experiment with the generation of a logic representation from the declarative form of each question. Several studies, deal with the logic approaches in question-answering, are discussed in other languages than the Arabic language. This representation is very promising because it helps us later in the selection of a justifiable answer. The accuracy of questions that are correctly analyzed and translated into the logic form achieved 64%. And then, the results of passages of texts that are automatically generated achieved an 87% score for accuracy and a 98% score for c@1.     

基于常见问题库的多搜索引擎自动问答系统

与传统的搜索引擎相比,自动问答系统支持自然语言提问,返回给用户一个简短而准确的答案,是自然语言处理领域的一个研究热点。文中介绍了一种基于常见问题库的多搜索引擎自动问答系统,它利用常见问题库和两大搜索引擎,快速准确地回答用户的问题,更加智能化地满足用户的检索需求。     

基于Web的中文开放式问题回答系统

互联网正逐渐成为重要的信息资源，然而大多数搜索引擎不能处理自然语言提出的问题。基于互联网的中文问题回答系统由问题处理、信息检索、答案抽取和答案判断组成，利用命名实体识别、语义依存关系和案例规则模板实现答案抽取。实验表明：命名实体识别、语义依存关系和案例规则模板能有效地实现答案抽取，获得较高正确率。     

Findex: improving search result use through automatic filtering categories

Long result lists from web search engines can be tedious to use. We designed a text categorization algorithm and a filtering user interface to address the problem. The Findex system provides an overview of the results by presenting a list of the most frequent words and phrases as result categories next to the actual results. Selecting a category (word or phrase) filters the result list to show only the results containing it. An experiment with 20 participants was conducted to compare the category design to the de facto standard solution (Google-type ranked list interface). Results show that the users were 25% faster and 21% more accurate with our system. In particular, participants' speed of finding relevant results was 40% higher with the proposed system. Subjective ratings revealed significantly more positive attitudes towards the new system. Results indicate that the proposed design is feasible and beneficial.     

A trust-based service suggestion system using human plausible reasoning

Nowadays, there is a growing need to manage trust in open systems as they may contain untrustworthy service providers. Agent Trust Management (ATM) tries to address the problem of finding a set of the most trusted agents in multi agent systems. This paper presents ScubAA, a novel generic ATM framework based on the theory of Human Plausible Reasoning (HPR). For each user’s request, ScubAA determines a ranked list of the most trusted service agents, within the context of the request, and forwards the request to those trusted services only. ScubAA determines an agent’s degree of trust in terms of a single personalized value derived from several types of evidences such as user’s feedback, history of user’s interactions, context of the submitted request, references from third party users as well as from third party service agents, and structure of the society of agents. ScubAA is able to utilize more trust evidences towards a more accurate value of trust. We also propose a function to figure out how similar two users are in a given context. We apply the proposed HPR-based ATM framework to the domain of Web search. The resulting ATM system recommends to the user a list of the most trusted search engines ranked according to the retrieval precision of documents returned in response to the user’s query as well as the degree of trust of the search engines have gained by interacting with other related users within the context of the query. In addition, we conduct a statistical analysis of ScubAA based on ANOVA and by using a data set of forty queries in different domains. This analysis clearly reveals that ScubAA is able to successfully assess the trustworthiness of service agents.     

SEFT: a search engine for text

We present a software tool called seft which balances the convenience of search tools such as grep with the functionality of full‐text index‐based information retrieval. Based on a novel retrieval heuristic which uses term locality as a guide to relevance, seft combines the freedom of natural language queries with the benefits of a ranked answer list and easy inspection of retrieval results. While not as fast as grep ‐style tools, seft provides a valuable facility for impromptu personal information retrieval tasks. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

QA-KGNet: 一种语言模型驱动的知识图谱问答模型

基于知识图谱的问答系统可以解析用户问题,已成为一种检索知识、自动回答所询问题的有效途径.知识图谱问答系统通常是利用神经程序归纳模型,将自然语言问题转化为逻辑形式,在知识图谱上执行该逻辑形式能够得到答案.然而,使用预训练语言模型和知识图谱的知识问答系统包含两个挑战:(1)给定问答(questionanswering, QA)上下文,需要从大型知识图谱(knowledge graph, KG)中识别相关知识;(2)对QA上下文和KG进行联合推理.基于此,提出一种语言模型驱动的知识图谱问答推理模型QA-KGNet,将QA上下文和KG连接起来形成一个工作图,使用语言模型计算给定QA上下文节点与KG节点的关联度,并使用多头图注意力网络更新节点表示.在Commonsense QA、OpenBookQA和Med QA-USMLE真实数据集上进行实验来评估QA-KGNet的性能,实验结果表明:QA-KGNet优于现有的基准模型,表现出优越的结构化推理能力.     

Visualizing Expanded Query Results

When performing queries in web search engines, users often face difficulties choosing appropriate query terms. Search engines therefore usually suggest a list of expanded versions of the user query to disambiguate it or to resolve potential term mismatches. However, it has been shown that users find it difficult to choose an expanded query from such a list. In this paper, we describe the adoption of set‐based text visualization techniques to visualize how query expansions enrich the result space of a given user query and how the result sets relate to each other. Our system uses a linguistic approach to expand queries and topic modeling to extract the most informative terms from the results of these queries. In a user study, we compare a common text list of query expansion suggestions to three set‐based text visualization techniques adopted for visualizing expanded query results – namely, Compact Euler Diagrams, Parallel Tag Clouds, and a List View – to resolve ambiguous queries using interactive query expansion. Our results show that text visualization techniques do not increase retrieval efficiency, precision, or recall. Overall, users rate Parallel Tag Clouds visualizing key terms of the expanded query space lowest. Based on the results, we derive recommendations for visualizations of query expansion results, text visualization techniques in general, and discuss alternative use cases of set‐based text visualization techniques in the context of web search.     

Optimizing search engines results using linear programming

When a query is passed to multiple search engines, each search engine returns a ranked list of documents. Researchers have demonstrated that combining results, in the form of a “metasearch engine”, produces a significant improvement in coverage and search effectiveness. This paper proposes a linear programming mathematical model for optimizing the ranked list result of a given group of Web search engines for an issued query. An application with a numerical illustration shows the advantages of the proposed method.     

Personalized mining of web documents using link structures and fuzzy concept networks

Personalized search engines are important tools for finding web documents for specific users, because they are able to provide the location of information on the WWW as accurately as possible, using efficient methods of data mining and knowledge discovery. The types and features of traditional search engines are various, including support for different functionality and ranking methods. New search engines that use link structures have produced improved search results which can overcome the limitations of conventional text-based search engines. Going a step further, this paper presents a system that provides users with personalized results derived from a search engine that uses link structures. The fuzzy document retrieval system (constructed from a fuzzy concept network based on the user's profile) personalizes the results yielded from link-based search engines with the preferences of the specific user. A preliminary experiment with six subjects indicates that the developed system is capable of searching not only relevant but also personalized web pages, depending on the preferences of the user.     

Arabic question answering system: a survey

Question answering is a subfield of information retrieval. It is a task of answering a question posted in a natural language. A question answering system (QAS) may be considered a good alternative to search engines that return a set of related documents. The QAS system is composed of three main modules; question analysis, passage retrieval, and answer extraction. Over the years, numerous QASs have been presented for use in different languages. However, the the development of Arabic QASs has been slowed by linguistic challenges and the lack of resources and tools available to researchers. In this survey, we start with the challenges due to the language and how these challenges make the development of new Arabic QAS more difficult. Next, we do a detailed review of several Arabic QASs. This is followed by an in-depth analysis of the techniques and approaches in the three modules of a QAS. We present an overview of important and recent tools that were developed to help the researchers in this field. We also cover the available Arabic and multilingual datasets, and a look at the different measures used to assess QASs. Finally, the survey delves into the future direction of Arabic QAS systems based on the current state-of-the-art techniques developed for question answering in other languages.

     

Search structures and algorithms for personalized ranking

As data of an unprecedented scale are becoming accessible on the Web, personalization, of narrowing down the retrieval to meet the user-specific information needs, is becoming more and more critical. For instance, while web search engines traditionally retrieve the same results for all users, they began to offer beta services to personalize the results to adapt to user-specific contexts such as prior search history or other application contexts. In a clear contrast to search engines dealing with unstructured text data, this paper studies how to enable such personalization in the context of structured data retrieval. In particular, we adopt contextual ranking model to formalize personalization as a cost-based optimization over collected contextual rankings. With this formalism, personalization can be abstracted as a cost-optimal retrieval of contextual ranking, closely matching user-specific retrieval context. With the retrieved matching context, we adopt a machine learning approach, to effectively and efficiently identify the ideal personalized ranked results for this specific user. Our empirical evaluations over synthetic and real-life data validate both the efficiency and effectiveness of our framework.     

句子相似度计算新方法及在问答系统中的应用

计算句子的相似度在机器问答、机器翻译、文本分类等系统中有着非常重要的作用。该文对基于相同关键词的句子相似模型作了进一步的改进,包括关键词抽取,以及在句子相似度的定义中引入同义词以及近义词的情形。并以此为基础,实现了一个基于常问问题集的中文自动问答系统,对用户以自然语言输入的问题,该系统能够自动地在FAQ（Frequently-Asked Question）库中寻找候选问题集,通过计算句子相似度,将匹配的答案返回给用户。该系统还能够自动地更新和维护FAQ库。实验结果表明,这种新方法在问答系统中匹配问句时比其他方法具有较高的准确率。     

A Knowledge-Based Approach to Effective Document Retrieval

This paper presents a knowledge-based approach to effective document retrieval. This approach is based on a dual document model that consists of a document type hierarchy and a folder organization. A predicate-based document query language is proposed to enable users to precisely and accurately specify the search criteria and their knowledge about the documents to be retrieved. A guided search tool is developed as an intelligent natural language oriented user interface to assist users formulating queries. Supported by an intelligent question generator, an inference engine, a question base, and a predicate-based query composer, the guided search collects the most important information known to the user to retrieve the documents that satisfy users' particular interests. A knowledge-based query processing and search engine is devised as the core component in this approach. Algorithms are developed for the search engine to effectively and efficiently retrieve the documents that match the query.     

Comparing top-k XML lists

Systems that produce ranked lists of results are abundant. For instance, Web search engines return ranked lists of Web pages. There has been work on distance measure for list permutations, like Kendall tau and Spearman's footrule, as well as extensions to handle top-k lists, which are more common in practice. In addition to ranking whole objects (e.g., Web pages), there is an increasing number of systems that provide keyword search on XML or other semistructured data, and produce ranked lists of XML sub-trees. Unfortunately, previous distance measures are not suitable for ranked lists of sub-trees since they do not account for the possible overlap between the returned sub-trees. That is, two sub-trees differing by a single node would be considered separate objects. In this paper, we present the first distance measures for ranked lists of sub-trees, and show under what conditions these measures are metrics. Furthermore, we present algorithms to efficiently compute these distance measures. Finally, we evaluate and compare the proposed measures on real data using three popular XML keyword proximity search systems.     

面向水利信息资源的智能问答系统构建与应用

当前特定领域的问答系统主要采用基于关键字匹配的方法完成问答,类似水库大坝的建成时间、坝高等,无法充分理解用户自然语言提问的检索意图并给出准确回答。为此基于知识图谱技术,利用语义解析方法,本文设计并开发面向水利信息资源的智能问答系统。针对语义解析自然语言问句转化为结构化查询语句需要多步操作,容易导致语义鸿沟问题,还为了后续基于知识表示的问答方法,积累用户语料,本文提出一种语料扩展方法构建语料库。     

无纸化考试系统中SQL Server 2000全文检索技术的应用

全文检索技术是从海量信息里精确查找所需信息的最有效手段,它的应用提高了海量文档的检索效率。该文阐述了SQLServer 2000全文检索技术在无纸化考试子系统中的具体应用,该系统采用了B/S结构,应用业务层采用C#语言开发,用户界面层采用ASP.NET开发。