Introspection and Adaptable Model Integration for Dialogue-based Question Answering

Dialogue-based Question Answering (QA) is a highly complex task that brings together a QA system including various natural language processing components (i.e., components for question classification, information extraction, and retrieval) with dialogue systems for effective and natural communication. The dialogue-based access is difficult to establish when the QA system in use is complex and combines many different answer services with different quality and access characteristics. For example, some questions are processed by opendomain QA services with a broad coverage. Others should be processed by using a domain-specific instance ontology for more reliable answers. Different answer services may change their characteristics over time and the dialogue reaction models have to be updated according to that. To solve this problem, we developed introspective methods to integrate adaptable models of the answer services. We evaluated the impact of the learned models on the dialogue performance, i.e., whether the adaptable models can be used for a more convenient dialogue formulation process. We show significant effectiveness improvements in the resulting dialogues when using the machine learning (ML) models. Examples are provided in the context of the generation of system-initiative feedback to user questions and answers, as provided by heterogeneous information services.

Daniel Sonntag