Related papers: Opacity, Obscurity, and the Geometry of Question-A…
Answering open-ended questions is an essential capability for any intelligent agent. One of the most interesting recent open-ended question answering challenges is Visual Question Answering (VQA) which attempts to evaluate a system's visual…
In an increasingly polarized world, demagogues who reduce complexity down to simple arguments based on emotion are gaining in popularity. Are opinions and online discussions falling into demagoguery? In this work, we aim to provide…
Many widely different problems have a common mathematical structure wherein limited knowledge lead to ambiguity that can be captured conveniently using a concept of invisibility that requires the introduction of negative values for…
The questions in a crowdsourcing task typically exhibit varying degrees of difficulty and subjectivity. Their joint effects give rise to the variation in responses to the same question by different crowd-workers. This variation is low when…
Conversational search systems increasingly employ clarifying questions to refine user queries and improve the search experience. Previous studies have demonstrated the usefulness of text-based clarifying questions in enhancing both…
Lexical ambiguity presents a profound and enduring challenge to the language sciences. Researchers for decades have grappled with the problem of how language users learn, represent and process words with more than one meaning. Our work…
In an educational setting, an estimate of the difficulty of multiple-choice questions (MCQs), a commonly used strategy to assess learning progress, constitutes very useful information for both teachers and students. Since human assessment…
Natural language is ambiguous. Resolving ambiguous questions is key to successfully answering them. Focusing on questions about images, we create a dataset of ambiguous examples. We annotate these, grouping answers by the underlying…
Opacity is a property expressing whether a system may reveal its secret to a passive observer (an intruder) who knows the structure of the system but has a limited observation of its behavior. Several notions of opacity have been studied,…
Politeness is a core dimension of human communication, yet its role in human-AI information seeking remains underexplored. We investigate how user politeness behaviour shapes conversational outcomes in a cooking-assistance setting. First,…
Asking clarifying questions in response to search queries has been recognized as a useful technique for revealing the underlying intent of the query. Clarification has applications in retrieval systems with different interfaces, from the…
Algorithmic transparency entails exposing system properties to various stakeholders for purposes that include understanding, improving, and contesting predictions. Until now, most research into algorithmic transparency has predominantly…
With the rise of voice assistants and an increase in mobile search usage, natural language has become an important query language. So far, most of the current systems are not able to process these queries because of the vagueness and…
Ambiguous questions persist in open-domain question answering, because formulating a precise question with a unique answer is often challenging. Previously, Min et al. (2020) have tackled this issue by generating disambiguated questions for…
Recent work in semantic parsing for question answering has focused on long and complicated questions, many of which would seem unnatural if asked in a normal conversation between two humans. In an effort to explore a conversational QA…
In the era of Big Knowledge Graphs, Question Answering (QA) systems have reached a milestone in their performance and feasibility. However, their applicability, particularly in specific domains such as the biomedical domain, has not gained…
Clarification questions are an essential dialogue tool to signal misunderstanding, ambiguities, and under-specification in language use. While humans are able to resolve uncertainty by asking questions since childhood, modern dialogue…
Visual question answering (VQA) has the potential to make the Internet more accessible in an interactive way, allowing people who cannot see images to ask questions about them. However, multiple studies have shown that people who are blind…
Question Answering (QA) systems are becoming the inspiring model for the future of search engines. While recently, underlying datasets for QA systems have been promoted from unstructured datasets to structured datasets with highly…
Why are some events more surprising than others? We propose that events that are more difficult to explain are those that are more surprising. The two experiments reported here test the impact of different event outcomes (Outcome-Type) and…