1. AQUAINT Kickoff Meeting – December 2001 Integrating Robust Semantics, Event Detection, Information Fusion, and Summarization for Multimedia Question Answering Vasileios Hatzivassiloglou, Kathleen R. McKeown Columbia University Dan Jurafsky, Wayne H. Ward, James H. Martin University of Colorado

2. AQUAINT Kickoff Meeting – December 2001 Current State of the Art TREC Q&A track Technology enabling focused retrieval Good coverage (up to 70%) of facts (who, when, where) Issues: –System must understand the question type –Answers extracted verbatim from the source –One source at a time

3. AQUAINT Kickoff Meeting – December 2001 Our focus – Question type Facts, but not absolute facts Rather, questions with answers that depend on –source –perspective –time When Mullah Omar was born vs. Who controls Jalalabad?

4. AQUAINT Kickoff Meeting – December 2001 Our focus – Multiple sources Integrate answers from multiple sources Use similarities across sources to locate core part of the answer Highlight important differences between sources

5. AQUAINT Kickoff Meeting – December 2001 Our focus – Answer form Answer contains –Core part where sources agree –Differences in perspective –Trends in time Text is not copied verbatim Text generation allows for concise combination of materials from multiple sources

6. AQUAINT Kickoff Meeting – December 2001 Our focus – Q&A Environment Spoken and written questions Specialized language model for accepting questions in realistic, noisy environments Context management system allows for –clarifications –follow-up questions

7. AQUAINT Kickoff Meeting – December 2001 Technology innovations Specialized speech recognition and dialog management Semantic parsing of questions and source text Event recognition Information fusion

8. AQUAINT Kickoff Meeting – December 2001 Architecture

9. AQUAINT Kickoff Meeting – December 2001 Semantic Parsing Use of semantic information important in many of the current best Q&A systems (Srihari et al 2000; Hovy et al 2001; Harabagiu et al 2001) Semantics often derived from lexical relationships and taxonomies, e.g., WordNet We will use instead an explicit representation of semantic roles, FrameNet Shallow, efficiently computable semantic representation

10. AQUAINT Kickoff Meeting – December 2001 FrameNet FrameNet provides database of words with associated semantic roles

11. AQUAINT Kickoff Meeting – December 2001 Filling in semantic roles Initial statistical syntactic parse identifies dependencies Statistical classifier assigns roles to phrases Issues: –Prominent role for named entities –Generalization across domains –FrameNet coverage and fallback techniques

12. AQUAINT Kickoff Meeting – December 2001 Event recognition Events vs. topics Events as a basis for segmenting documents and classifying document fragments as matching a question Event algebra will allow –grouping sub-events –linking related events –detecting updates

13. AQUAINT Kickoff Meeting – December 2001 Detecting an event Hypothesis: Events can be detected on –participants (named entities, semantic roles) –time –location –limited constraints on verbs

14. AQUAINT Kickoff Meeting – December 2001 Information fusion Combining answer fragments in a concise response Summarization for question answering –Clustering of related fragments at the phrase level –Identification of syntactic dependencies and semantic roles –Fusion of matching entities, including paraphrases –Regeneration of the answer

15. AQUAINT Kickoff Meeting – December 2001 Technologies for information fusion and generation Learning paraphrases, syntactic and lexical (countless – lots of, repulsion – aversion) Detecting important differences Merging descriptions Learning and formulating content plans

16. AQUAINT Kickoff Meeting – December 2001 Speech and Dialog for Q&A Adapt speech recognition technology for –unknown words (using robust semantic classes) –named entities –noisy environment Dialog system for clarification and follow-up –use semantic annotation to generalize across domains –maintain focus on important semantic elements

17. AQUAINT Kickoff Meeting – December 2001 Data Input will come from TREC and TDT-3 –extended time span –multiple sources reporting on same event Annotation –TREC: focus on absolute facts –local: focus on questions with multiple answers –AQUAINT-level?

18. AQUAINT Kickoff Meeting – December 2001 Evaluation Component evaluation (several levels) –Identifying granularity of evaluation units –IR measures such as precision and recall –Human judgments for equivalence of output End-to-end evaluation –Participation in TREC –Extension of TREC methodology to questions with multiple answers

19. AQUAINT Kickoff Meeting – December 2001 Tools we have (and can share) C OMMUNICATOR speech recognition system (see our demo) FrameNet semantic resources and statistical semantic parser Document- and sentence-level clustering tools Summarization software (for the last two, see our NEWSBLASTER demo)

20. AQUAINT Kickoff Meeting – December 2001 Tools we are looking for Robust named entity recognizers Tools for classifying questions and identifying important elements in questions Tools for aiding human annotators

21. AQUAINT Kickoff Meeting – December 2001 Goals for the first six months Initial FrameNet parser (limited coverage) Identification of participants, time, location Identifying paraphrases from comparable news reports on the same event Adapting information fusion from summarization to question-answering Building prototype Q&A system