Title
A Semi-Supervised Learning Approach to Why-Question Answering.
Abstract
We propose a semi-supervised learning method for improving why-question answering (why-QA). The key of our method is to generate training data (question-answer pairs) from causal relations in texts such as \"[Tsunamis are generated]effect because [the ocean's water mass is displaced by an earthquake]cause.\" A naive method for the generation would be to make a question-answer pair by simply converting the effect part of the causal relations into a why-question, like \"Why are tsunamis generated?\" from the above example, and using the source text of the causal relations as an answer. However, in our preliminary experiments, this naive method actually failed to improve the why-QA performance. The main reason was that the machine-generated questions were often incomprehensible like \"Why does (it) happen?\", and that the system suffered from overfitting to the results of our automatic causality recognizer. Hence, we developed a novel method that effectively filters out incomprehensible questions and retrieves from texts answers that are likely to be paraphrases of a given causal relation. Through a series of experiments, we showed that our approach significantly improved the precision of the top answer by 8% over the current state-of-the-art system for Japanese why-QA.
Year
Venue
Field
2016
AAAI
Training set,Causality,Semi-supervised learning,Question answering,Computer science,Causal relations,Artificial intelligence,Natural language processing,Overfitting,Source text,Machine learning
DocType
Citations 
PageRank 
Conference
3
0.39
References 
Authors
17
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Jong-Hoon Oh137832.18
Kentaro Torisawa288170.45
Chikara Hashimoto331222.79
Ryu Iida427425.13
Masahiro Tanaka5567.00
Julien Kloetzer6727.98