Text Question Answering Research Articles

A textual question answering and handwritten answer evaluation system for hindi language

Textual Question Answering targets answering questions defined in natural language. Question Answering Systems offer an automated approach to procuring answers to queries expressed in natural language. The need for Multilingual Question Answering without performing machine translation is ever existing. Besides that, automating tasks with the help of technology to assist humans, has been the main aim of research in recent years. This paper presents an automated answer evaluation system for reading comprehension-based questions in the Hindi language without requiring translation in any other language. The system accepts text, question, and handwritten answer of a student in the form of an image for answer evaluation. This is accomplished by developing a textual question-answering system for reading comprehension. It is an extractive approach that utilizes RoBERTa transformer model and fine-tunes it for Hindi question-answering. The answer to the question is extracted as a span from the provided text. Further, a handwritten text recognizer model is developed employing a Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network with Connectionist Temporal Classification module along with two layers of Bidirectional LSTM. Experimentation is performed using existing as well as self-created datasets to show the effectiveness of the proposed approach. An accuracy of 98.69% is obtained on the self-created Hindi-QA dataset and the proposed system outperformed the other existing methods. The paper also discusses potential research directions in the field.

Hyperbolic Directed Hypergraph-Based Reasoning for Multi-Hop KBQA

The target of the multi-hop knowledge base question-answering task is to find answers of some factoid questions by reasoning across multiple knowledge triples in the knowledge base. Most of the existing methods for multi-hop knowledge base question answering based on a general knowledge graph ignore the semantic relationship between each hop. However, modeling the knowledge base as a directed hypergraph has the problems of sparse incidence matrices and asymmetric Laplacian matrices. To make up for the deficiency, we propose a directed hypergraph convolutional network modeled on hyperbolic space, which can better deal with the sparse structure, and effectively adapt to the problem of an asymmetric incidence matrix of directed hypergraphs modeled on a knowledge base. We propose an interpretable KBQA model based on the hyperbolic directed hypergraph convolutional neural network named HDH-GCN which can update relation semantic information hop-by-hop and pays attention to different relations at different hops. The model can improve the accuracy of the multi-hop knowledge base question-answering task, and has application value in text question answering, human–computer interactions and other fields. Extensive experiments on benchmarks—PQL, MetaQA—demonstrate the effectiveness and universality of our HDH-GCN model, leading to state-of-the-art performance.

Inner Knowledge-based Img2Doc Scheme for Visual Question Answering

Visual Question Answering (VQA) is a research topic of significant interest at the intersection of computer vision and natural language understanding. Recent research indicates that attributes and knowledge can effectively improve performance for both image captioning and VQA. In this article, an inner knowledge-based Img2Doc algorithm for VQA is presented. The inner knowledge is characterized as the inner attribute relationship in visual images. In addition to using an attribute network for inner knowledge-based image representation, VQA scheme is associated with a question-guided Doc2Vec method for question–answering. The attribute network generates inner knowledge-based features for visual images, while a novel question-guided Doc2Vec method aims at converting natural language text to vector features. After the vector features are extracted, they are combined with visual image features into a classifier to provide an answer. Based on our model, the VQA problem is resolved by textual question answering. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves superior performance on multiple benchmark datasets.

A Novel Framework using Zero Shot Learning Technique for Non-Factoid Question Answering System

Non-Factoid Question Answering (QA) is the next generation of textual QA systems, which gives passage level summaries for a natural language query, posted by the user. The main issue lies in the appropriateness of the generated summary. This paper proposes a framework for non-factoid QA system, which has three main components: (i) A deep neural network classifier, which produces sentence vector considering word correlation and context. (ii) Zero shot classifier that uses a multi-channel Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), to extract knowledge from multiple sources in the knowledge accumulator. This output acts as a knowledge enhancer that strengthens the passage level summary. (iii) Summary generator that uses Maximal Marginal Relevance (MMR) algorithm, which computes similarity among the query related answer and the sentences from zero shot classifier. This model is applied on the datasets WikiPassageQA and ANTIQUE. The experimental analysis shows that this model gives comparatively better results for WikiPassageQA dataset.

A Novel Framework Using Zero Shot Learning Technique for a Non-Factoid Question Answering System

Non-Factoid Question Answering (QA) is the next generation of textual QA systems, which gives passage level summaries for a natural language query, posted by the user. The main issue lies in the appropriateness of the generated summary. This paper proposes a framework for non-factoid QA system, which has three main components: (i) A deep neural network classifier, which produces sentence vector considering word correlation and context. (ii) Zero shot classifier that uses a multi-channel Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), to extract knowledge from multiple sources in the knowledge accumulator. This output acts as a knowledge enhancer that strengthens the passage level summary. (iii) Summary generator that uses Maximal Marginal Relevance (MMR) algorithm, which computes similarity among the query related answer and the sentences from zero shot classifier. This model is applied on the datasets WikiPassageQA and ANTIQUE. The experimental analysis shows that this model gives comparatively better results for WikiPassageQA dataset.

A Review on Medical Textual Question Answering Systems Based on Deep Learning Approaches

The advent of Question Answering Systems (QASs) has been envisaged as a promising solution and an efficient approach for retrieving significant information over the Internet. A considerable amount of research work has focused on open domain QASs based on deep learning techniques due to the availability of data sources. However, the medical domain receives less attention due to the shortage of medical datasets. Although Electronic Health Records (EHRs) are empowering the field of Medical Question-Answering (MQA) by providing medical information to answer user questions, the gap is still large in the medical domain, especially for textual-based sources. Therefore, in this study, the medical textual question-answering systems based on deep learning approaches were reviewed, and recent architectures of MQA systems were thoroughly explored. Furthermore, an in-depth analysis of deep learning approaches used in different MQA system tasks was provided. Finally, the different critical challenges posed by MQA systems were highlighted, and recommendations to effectively address them in forthcoming MQA systems were given out.

A Metamorphic Testing Approach for Assessing Question Answering Systems

Question Answering (QA) enables the machine to understand and answer questions posed in natural language, which has emerged as a powerful tool in various domains. However, QA is a challenging task and there is an increasing concern about its quality. In this paper, we propose to apply the technique of metamorphic testing (MT) to evaluate QA systems from the users’ perspectives, in order to help the users to better understand the capabilities of these systems and then to select appropriate QA systems for their specific needs. Two typical categories of QA systems, namely, the textual QA (TQA) and visual QA (VQA), are studied, and a total number of 17 metamorphic relations (MRs) are identified for them. These MRs respectively focus on some characteristics of different aspects of QA. We further apply MT to four QA systems (including two APIs from the AllenNLP platform, one API from the Transformers platform, and one API from CloudCV) by using all of the MRs. Our experimental results demonstrate the capabilities of the four subject QA systems from various aspects, revealing their strengths and weaknesses. These results further suggest that MT can be an effective method for assessing QA systems.

Recent Trends in Deep Learning Based Open-Domain Textual Question Answering Systems

Open-domain textual question answering (QA), which aims to answer questions from large data sources like Wikipedia or the web, has gained wide attention in recent years. Recent advancements in open-domain textual QA are mainly due to the significant developments of deep learning techniques, especially machine reading comprehension and neural-network-based information retrieval, which allows the models to continuously refresh state-of-the-art performances. However, a comprehensive review of existing approaches and recent trends is lacked in this field. To address this issue, we present a thorough survey to explicitly give the task scope of open-domain textual QA, overview recent key advancements on deep learning based open-domain textual QA, illustrate the models and acceleration methods in detail, and introduce open-domain textual QA datasets and evaluation metrics. Finally, we summary the models, discuss the limitations of existing works and potential future research directions.

Intelligent conversation system using multiple classification ripple down rules and conversational context

We introduce an extension to Multiple Classification Ripple Down Rules (MCRDR), called Contextual MCRDR (C-MCRDR). We apply C-MCRDR knowledge-base systems (KBS) to the Textual Question Answering (TQA) and Natural Language Interface to Databases (NLIDB) paradigms in restricted domains as a type of spoken dialog system (SDS) or conversational agent (CA). C-MCRDR implicitly maintains topical conversational context, and intra-dialog context is retained allowing explicit referencing in KB rule conditions and classifications. To facilitate NLIDB, post-inference C-MCRDR classifications can include generic query referencing – query specificity is achieved by the binding of pre-identified context. In contrast to other scripted, or syntactically complex systems, the KB of the live system can easily be maintained courtesy of the RDR knowledge engineering approach. For evaluation, we applied this system to a pedagogical domain that uses a production database for the generation of offline course-related documents. Our system complemented the domain by providing a spoken or textual question-answering alternative for undergraduates based on the same production database. The developed system incorporates a speech-enabled chatbot interface via Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and experimental results from a live, integrated feedback rating system showed significant user acceptance, indicating the approach is promising, feasible and further work is warranted. Evaluation of the prototype’s viability found the system responded appropriately for 80.3% of participant requests in the tested domain, and it responded inappropriately for 19.7% of requests due to incorrect dialog classifications (4.4%) or out of scope requests (15.3%). Although the semantic range of the evaluated domain was relatively shallow, we conjecture that the developed system is readily adoptable as a CA NLIDB tool in other more semantically-rich domains and it shows promise in single or multi-domain environments.

Enhanced question understanding with dynamic memory networks for textual question answering

Memory networks show promising context understanding and reasoning capabilities in Textual Question Answering (Textual QA). We improve the previous dynamic memory networks to do Textual QA by processing inputs to simultaneously extract global and hierarchical salient features. We then use them to construct multiple feature sets at each reasoning step. Experiments were conducted on a public Textual Question Answering dataset (Facebook bAbI dataset) in two ways: with and without supervision from labels of supporting facts. Compared to previous works such as Dynamic Memory Networks, our models show better accuracy and stability.

Open-domain textual question answering techniques

Textual question answering is a technique of extracting a sentence or text snippet from a document or document collection that responds directly to a query. Open-domain textual question answering presupposes that questions are natural and unrestricted with respect to topic. The question answering (Q/A) techniques, as embodied in today's systems, can be roughly divided into two types: (1) techniques for Information Seeking (IS), which localize the answer in vast document collections; and (2) techniques for Reading Comprehension (RC) that answer a series of questions related to a given document. Although these two types of techniques and systems are different, it is desirable to combine them for enabling more advanced forms of Q/A. This paper discusses an approach that successfully enhanced an existing IS system with RC capabilities. This enhancement is important because advanced Q/A, as exemplified by the ARDA AQUAINT program, is moving towards Q/A systems that incorporate semantic and pragmatic knowledge enabling dialogue-based Q/A. Because today's RC systems involve a short series of questions in context, they represent a rudimentary form of interactive Q/A which constitutes a possible foundation for more advanced forms of dialogue-based Q/A.