Answering Complicated Question Intents Expressed in Decomposed Question Sequences

Mohit Iyyer; Wen-tau Yih; Ming-Wei Chang

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arXiv · 1611.01242

Answering Complicated Question Intents Expressed in Decomposed Question Sequences

Mohit Iyyer·Wen-tau Yih·Ming-Wei Chang

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Abstract

Recent work in semantic parsing for question answering has focused on long and complicated questions, many of which would seem unnatural if asked in a normal conversation between two humans. In an effort to explore a conversational QA setting, we present a more realistic task: answering sequences of simple but inter-related questions. We collect a dataset of 6,066 question sequences that inquire about semi-structured tables from Wikipedia, with 17,553 question-answer pairs in total. Existing QA systems face two major problems when evaluated on our dataset: (1) handling questions that contain coreferences to previous questions or answers, and (2) matching words or phrases in a question to corresponding entries in the associated table. We conclude by proposing strategies to handle both of these issues.

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Mohit Iyyer, Wen-tau Yih, Ming-Wei Chang. 2016-11-04. Answering Complicated Question Intents Expressed in Decomposed Question Sequences. https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.01242

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