1. AQUAINT Kickoff Meeting Advanced Techniques for Answer Extraction and Formulation Language Computer Corporation www.languagecomputer.com Dallas, Texas PI: Dan Moldovan moldovan@languagecomputer.com

2. AQUAINT Kickoff Meeting - AnsQA Advanced Techniques for Answer Extraction and Formulation  People Dan Moldovan, PI Sanda Harabagiu, Co-PI Mihai Surdeanu Marius Pasca John Lehmann Vasile Rus Earl Hood

3. AQUAINT Kickoff Meeting - AnsQA Tasks  Task 1. QA System Taxonomy  Task 2. Answer fusion  Task 3. Develop methods for on-line ontology construction  Task 4. Develop an inference engine capable of providing answer justification  Task 5. Formulate concise and coherent answers  Task 6. Explore new QA System Architectures.

4. AQUAINT Kickoff Meeting - AnsQA T1: QA System Taxonomy  Need for a taxonomy  Goal: Develop elaborate taxonomies for QA systems and applications  Approach: Develop QA System theoretical models Study tradeoffs and theoretical limits

5. AQUAINT Kickoff Meeting - AnsQA T1: QA System Taxonomy  Model QA system performance as a function of: Question space: scope, context, judgement Answer space: multiple-sources, fusion, interpretations Document space: type, indexing System architecture: modules, feedbacks Computing power: processing time, computer parameters Resources used: dictionaries, knowledge bases, knowledge acquisition, parsers, theorem provers

6. AQUAINT Kickoff Meeting - AnsQA T2: Answer Fusion  Goal: Develop methods to handle questions whose answers spread across several documents.  Approach: Map the original question into simpler queries Collect answers to these simple queries Ensemble an answer by fusing partial answers.

7. AQUAINT Kickoff Meeting - AnsQA T2: Answer Fusion  Study answer fusion at various levels of complexity Questions asking simple facts What countries import sugar from Cuba? Questions that require on-line ontology development What software products does Microsoft sell? What causes asthma? What are the effects of alcohol on the brain? Speculative questions about future events Does the Fed cut the interest rate at their next meeting?

8. AQUAINT Kickoff Meeting - AnsQA T2: Answer Fusion Use IE and Text Mining to map semantic relations into lexico-syntactic patterns that in turn help to develop ontologies. Q: What causes asthma?

9. AQUAINT Kickoff Meeting - AnsQA T3: On-line Ontology Development  Goal: Develop automatically ontological structures that help answer some complex questions  Approach: Use knowledge acquisition from text methods to extract and classify concepts and relations relevant to question keywords

10. AQUAINT Kickoff Meeting - AnsQA T3: On-line Ontology Development  Example: What software products does Microsoft sell?

11. AQUAINT Kickoff Meeting - AnsQA T4: Answer Justification  Goal: Develop an inference engine capable of justifying an answer via a logical proof  Approach: Transform questions and document paragraphs into logical representations Use world knowledge axioms extracted from WordNet glosses Construct lexical chains between query concepts and candidate answer sentence concepts Apply unification on lexical chains.

12. AQUAINT Kickoff Meeting - AnsQA T4: Answer Justification Logic proof for P2 succeeds and agent of shooting Sheriff_Pat_Garret unifies with PERSON e1 = e1’ x1 = x2’ x2 = x1’ P1: The scene called for Phillips’ character to be saved from a lynching when Billy the Kid (Emilio Estevez) shot the rope in half just as he was about to be hanged. P2: In 1881, outlaw William H. Bonney Jr., alias Billy the Kid, was shot and killed by Sheriff Pat Garrett in Fort Summer, N.M. Example Q481: Who shot Billy the Kid? LFT:

13. AQUAINT Kickoff Meeting - AnsQA T4: Answer Justification WordNet axioms: Columbian: of Columbia murder: kill intentionally with premeditation kill: cause to die A: “Several gunmen on a highway leading to the Columbian city of Ibaque murdered Colombian ambassador to Honduras Lucelly Garcia today.” Example Q045: When did Lucelly Garcia, former ambassador of Columbia to Honduras die?

14. AQUAINT Kickoff Meeting - AnsQA T5: Answer formulation  Goal: Develop methods to formulate concise and coherent answers  Approach: Answer formulation receives inputs from answer extraction, dialogue, and other modules. Language generation operators piece together the information provided by the answer elements.

15. AQUAINT Kickoff Meeting - AnsQA T5: Answer formulation

16. AQUAINT Kickoff Meeting - AnsQA T5: Answer formulation  Example: How do trade liberalization and foreign aid affect international migration?

17. AQUAINT Kickoff Meeting - AnsQA T6: Explore new QA System Architectures  Goal: Study innovative QA system architectures that are high performance, modular, and tunable.  Approach: Study via analytical modeling, simulations and implementation the architectural implications of features such as: High recall High precision Fast response time Portability Large volume and diversity of documents