Related papers: Question Answering is a Format; When is it Useful?

User queries are often underspecified and may admit multiple valid interpretations. Rather than silently making assumptions about the user's intent, a helpful assistant should surface such ambiguity by asking a clarifying question. Doing so…

Although general question answering has been well explored in recent years, temporal question answering is a task which has not received as much focus. Our work aims to leverage a popular approach used for general question answering, answer…

We present an open-domain Question-Answering system that learns to answer questions based on successful past interactions. We follow a pattern-based approach to Answer-Extraction, where (lexico-syntactic) patterns that relate a question to…

The importance of tasks in information retrieval (IR) has been long argued for, addressed in different ways, often ignored, and frequently revisited. For decades, scholars made a case for the role that a user's task plays in how and why…

Questions form an integral part of our everyday communication, both offline and online. Getting responses to our questions from others is fundamental to satisfying our information need and in extending our knowledge boundaries. A question…

This paper investigates the effectiveness of large language models (LLMs) in answering questions over datasets. We examine their performance in two scenarios: (a) directly answering questions given a dataset file as input, and (b)…

Using questions in written text is an effective strategy to enhance readability. However, what makes an active reading question good, what the linguistic role of these questions is, and what is their impact on human reading remains…

Many real-world applications (e.g., note taking, search) require extracting a sentence or paragraph from a document and showing that snippet to a human outside of the source document. Yet, users may find snippets difficult to understand as…

As machines have become more intelligent, there has been a renewed interest in methods for measuring their intelligence. A common approach is to propose tasks for which a human excels, but one which machines find difficult. However, an…

We show that in modeling social interaction, particularly dialogue, the attitude of obligation can be a useful adjunct to the popularly considered attitudes of belief, goal, and intention and their mutual and shared counterparts. In…

The dependency between an adequate question formulation and correct answer selection is a very intriguing but still underexplored area. In this paper, we show that question rewriting (QR) of the conversational context allows to shed more…

Often information relevant to a decision is summarized in an index number. This paper explores conditions under which conclusions using index numbers are relevant to the decision that needs to be made. Specifically it explores the idea that…

Creativity relates to the ability to generate novel and effective ideas in the areas of interest. How are such creative ideas generated? One possible mechanism that supports creative ideation and is gaining increased empirical attention is…

Visual Question Answering (VQA) is an emerging area of interest for researches, being a recent problem in natural language processing and image prediction. In this area, an algorithm needs to answer questions about certain images. As of the…

Visual Question Answering (VQA) presents a unique challenge as it requires the ability to understand and encode the multi-modal inputs - in terms of image processing and natural language processing. The algorithm further needs to learn how…

Question generation is a challenging task which aims to ask a question based on an answer and relevant context. The existing works suffer from the mismatching between question type and answer, i.e. generating a question with type $how$…

Recent years have seen a boom in interest in machine learning systems that can provide a human-understandable rationale for their predictions or decisions. However, exactly what kinds of explanation are truly human-interpretable remains…

Given the present state of work in natural language processing, this address argues first, that advance in both science and applications requires a revival of concern about what language is about, broadly speaking the world; and second,…

In visual question answering (VQA), a machine must answer a question given an associated image. Recently, accessibility researchers have explored whether VQA can be deployed in a real-world setting where users with visual impairments learn…

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…