Compositional question answering: A divide and conquer approach

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This paper describes how questions can be characterized for question answering (QA) along different facets and focuses on questions that cannot be answered directly but can be divided into simpler ones so that they can be answered directly using existing QA capabilities. Since individual answers are composed to generate the final answer, we call this process as compositional QA. The goal of the proposed QA method is to answer a composite question by dividing it into atomic ones, instead of developing an entirely new method tailored for the new question type. A question is analyzed automatically to determine its class, and its sub-questions are sent to the relevant QA modules. Answers returned from the individual QA modules are composed based on the predetermined plan corresponding to the question type. The experimental results based on 615 questions show that the compositional QA approach outperforms the simple routing method by about 17%. Considering 115 composite questions only, the F-score was almost tripled from the baseline.

论文关键词:Question answering,Compositional QA,Composite and atomic questions,Question analysis

论文评审过程:Received 12 April 2009, Revised 11 March 2010, Accepted 21 March 2010, Available online 13 May 2010.

论文官网地址:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ipm.2010.03.011