Automated performance assessment in interactive QA

In interactive question answering (QA), users and systems take turns to ask questions and provide answers. In such an interactive setting, user questions largely depend on the answers provided by the system. One question is whether user follow-up questions can provide feedback for the system to automatically assess its performance (e.g.,assess whether a correct answer is delivered). This self-awareness can make QA systems more intelligent for information seeking, for example, by adapting better strategies to cope with problematic situations. Therefore, this paper describes our initial investigation in addressing this problem. Our results indicate that interaction context can provide useful cues for automated performance assessment in interactive QA. Categories and Subject Descriptors: H.3.3 [Information Search and Retrieval]: Search Process General Terms: Experimentation, Performance

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: SIGIR
• Authors: Joyce Y. Chai, Tyler Baldwin, Chen Zhang
• Keywords: Interactive Question, QA Systems, SIGIR 2006, User Follow-up Questions