Amharic Question Answering for list questions: A case of Ethiopian tourism
No Thumbnail Available
Date
2013-06
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Addis Ababa University
Abstract
A Question answering (QA) system searches a large text collection and finds a short
phrase or sentence that precisely answers a user's question. To solve a QA problem,
we might first turn to traditional IR techniques, which have been applied successfully
to large scale text search problems. Alternatively, the Natural Language Processing
(NLP) and Information Extraction (IE) communities have developed techniques for
extracting very precise answers from text.
QA research attempts to deal with a wide range of question types including: fact, list,
definition, How, Why, hypothetical, semantically constrained, and cross-lingual
questions.
This research work focuses on list questions in closed domain Amharic questions
answering (AQA). It applies the hypothesis, which states that answers to a list
questions have same semantic entity class, answers that co-occur within the
sentences of the documents are related to the target and the question and sentences
containing the answers share similar context. In this research work, list questions
are answered using five major modules. The function of these modules are (1)
determining the answer type, (2) document retrieval, (3) Extract answer candidates
from the document, (4) computing similarity value for each pair of candidate answers
based on their co-occurrence within the sentence, (5) selecting final answers.
The QA system is evaluated and the experimental results show that the system
registered an average of 57.5% F-score. Nevertheless, the performance of the system
is greatly affected by the number for documents in the document database and
techniques applied.
As a result, we managed to develop a prototype for Amharic listing QA system in the
area of Ethiopian tourism.
KEYWORDS: Amharic Question Answering, List Questions, Answer Type, Candidate Answers,
Co-occurance, Question Answering Evaluation.
Description
Keywords
Amharic Question Answering, List Questions, Answer Type, Candidate Answers, Co-occurance, Question Answering Evaluation