Question Processing

component

E. Jembere

Based on Lecture slides form Kathy

McKeown lecture slides

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 QA Block Architecture

Question Processing Question Semantics

Passage Answer
Q
Query Formulation Keywords
Retrieval
Passages
Processing A
Question
Classification
WordNet
Document
Retrieval Parser
WordNet
NER
Parser
NER

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 Question Processing
• Two main tasks
 Query formulation: Extract keywords from
the question and formulate a query
 Question classification: Determining the
type of the answer.

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 Query formulation
Two ways in which query formulation is done
1. List of words
 This is done the same way it is done in IR systems
 To improve the system query expansion is often
applied.
 Query expansion: addition of query terms.
2. Query reformulation
 Queries are reformulated so that they can be in the
form they are most likely to be found
 E.g. “When was the laser invented” can be
reformulated to “the laser was invented”.

04/15/2023 © Jurafsky and Martin, Speech and Language Processing 4

 Question Classification
• Factoid questions…
 Who, where, when, how many…
 The answers fall into a limited and somewhat
predictable set of categories
 Who questions expect answer type “PERSON”
 Where questions expect a “PLACE”…
 Generally, systems select answer types from a
set of Named Entities, augmented with other
types that are relatively easy to extract.

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 Answer Types
• Of course, it isn’t that easy…
 Who questions can have organizations as
answers
 Who sells the most hybrid cars?
 Which questions can have people as answers
 Which president declared a state of disaster in SA
during thr COVID-19 crises?

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 Answer Type Detection
• For answer type detection we need
 Answer Type Taxonomy
 Question classifier
 typical features used for classification are
• Words in the question
• POS tags for the word
• Named entities
• Often a single word in the question determines the
question type
 We call such a word the head-word
• Semantics can be added to improve classification
accuracy
• Semantic Role labelling is often used to identify the
constituencies in the question
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Example: Answer Type Taxonomy
• Contains ~9000 concepts reflecting expected answer types
• Merges named entities with the WordNet hierarchy

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 Semantic Role Labelling
• The task of automatically determining which constituents in the sentence
are semantic arguments for a given predicate and then determining the
appropriate roles for each of those arguments

04/15/2023 © Jurafsky and Martin, Speech and Language Processing 9