• KIISE Transactions on Computing Practices
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• v.21 no.2
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• pp.144-147
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• 2015

Question Answering (QA) services can provide exact answers to user questions written in natural language form. This research focuses on how to build a QA system for a specific domain area. Online and offline QA system architecture of targeted domain such as domain detection, question analysis, reasoning, information retrieval, filtering, answer extraction, re-ranking, and answer generation, as well as data preparation are presented herein. Test results with an official Frequently Asked Question (FAQ) set showed 68% accuracy of the top 1 and 77% accuracy of the top 5. The contribution of each part such as question analysis system, document search engine, knowledge graph engine and re-ranking module for achieving the final answer are also presented.

• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.25 no.4
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• pp.686-711
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• 2015

The performance of a novel medical question-answering engine called CliniCluster and existing search engines, such as CQA-1.0, Google, and Google Scholar, was evaluated using known-item searching. Known-item searching is a document that has been critically appraised to be highly relevant to a therapy question. Results show that, using CliniCluster, known-items were retrieved on average at rank 2 ($MRR@10{\approx}0.50$), and most of the known-items could be identified from the top-10 document lists. In response to ill-defined questions, the known-items were ranked lower by CliniCluster and CQA-1.0, whereas for Google and Google Scholar, significant difference in ranking was not found between well- and ill-defined questions. Less than 40% of the known-items could be identified from the top-10 documents retrieved by CQA-1.0, Google, and Google Scholar. An analysis of the top-ranked documents by strength of evidence revealed that CliniCluster outperformed other search engines by providing a higher number of recent publications with the highest study design. In conclusion, the overall results support the use of CliniCluster in answering therapy questions by ranking highly relevant documents in the top positions of the search results.

• 한국정보컨버전스학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2008.06a
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• pp.53-56
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• 2008

This paper reports on the ACQA(Animated agent for Conversational Question Answering) project conducted at LIMSI. The aim is to design an expressive animated conversational agent(ACA) for conducting research along two main lines: 1/ perceptual experiments(eg perception of expressivity and 3D movements in both audio and visual channels): 2/ design of human-computer interfaces requiring head models at different resolutions and the integration of the talking head in virtual scenes. The target application of this expressive ACA is a real-time question and answer speech based system developed at LIMSI(RITEL). The architecture of the system is based on distributed modules exchanging messages through a network protocol. The main components of the system are: RITEL a question and answer system searching raw text, which is able to produce a text(the answer) and attitudinal information; this attitudinal information is then processed for delivering expressive tags; the text is converted into phoneme, viseme, and prosodic descriptions. Audio speech is generated by the LIMSI selection-concatenation text-to-speech engine. Visual speech is using MPEG4 keypoint-based animation, and is rendered in real-time by Virtual Choreographer (VirChor), a GPU-based 3D engine. Finally, visual and audio speech is played in a 3D audio and visual scene. The project also puts a lot of effort for realistic visual and audio 3D rendering. A new model of phoneme-dependant human radiation patterns is included in the speech synthesis system, so that the ACA can move in the virtual scene with realistic 3D visual and audio rendering.

• Journal of KIISE
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• v.43 no.8
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• pp.902-909
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• 2016

Question answering system (QA system) is a system that finds an actual answer to the question posed by a user, whereas a typical search engine would only find the links to the relevant documents. Recent works related to the open domain QA systems are receiving much attention in the fields of natural language processing, artificial intelligence, and data mining. However, the prior works on QA systems simply replace all words that are not in the training data with a single token, even though such unseen words are likely to play crucial roles in differentiating the candidate answers from the actual answers. In this paper, we propose a method to compute vectors of such unseen words by taking into account the context in which the words have occurred. Next, we also propose a model which utilizes inverse document frequencies (IDF) to efficiently process unseen words by expanding the system's vocabulary. Finally, we validate that the proposed method and model improve the performance of a QA system through experiments.