Exploiting Paraphrases and Deferred Sense Commitment to Interpret Questions more Reliably

Creating correct, semantic representations of questions is essential for applications that can use formal reasoning to answer them. However, even within a restricted domain, it is hard to anticipate all the possible ways that a question might be phrased, and engineer reliable processing modules to produce a correct semantic interpretation for the reasoner. In our work on posing questions to a biology knowledge base, we address this brittleness in two ways: First, we exploit the DIRT paraphrase database to introduce alternative phrasings of a question; Second, we defer word sense and semantic role commitment until question answering. Resulting ambiguities are then resolved by interleaving additional interpretation with question-answering, allowing the combinatorics of alternatives to be controlled and domain knowledge to guide paraphrase and sense selection. Our evaluation suggests that the resulting system is able to understand exam-style questions more reliably.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: COLING
• Authors: Peter Clark, Philip Harrison
• Keywords: COLING 2010, Computational Linguistics, Correct Semantic Interpretation, Engineer Reliable Processing, Semantic