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International Conference on Text, Speech, and Dialogue

TSD 2016: Text, Speech, and Dialogue pp 270–278Cite as

AQA: Automatic Question Answering System for Czech

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 9924))

Abstract

Question answering (QA) systems have become popular nowadays, however, a majority of them concentrates on the English language and most of them are oriented to a specific limited problem domain.

In this paper, we present a new question answering system called AQA (Automatic Question Answering). AQA is an open-domain QA system which allows users to ask all common questions related to a selected text collection. The first version of the AQA system is developed and tested for the Czech language, but we also plan to include more languages in future versions.

The AQA strategy consists of three main parts: question processing, answer selection and answer extraction. All modules are syntax-based with advanced scoring obtained by a combination of TF-IDF, tree distance between the question and candidate answers and other selected criteria. The answer extraction module utilizes named entity recognizer which allows the system to catch entities that are most likely to answer the question.

Evaluation of the AQA system is performed on a previously published Simple Question-Answering Database, or SQAD, with more than 3,000 question-answer pairs.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    One text token per line with multiple attributes separated by tabs.

  2. 2.

    In the current version, we use the morphological analyser Majka [5, 11] disambiguated by the DESAMB [7] tagger.

  3. 3.

    TF-IDF stands for Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency.

References

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Acknowledgments

This work has been partly supported by the Grant Agency of CR within the project 15-13277S. The research leading to these results has received funding from the Norwegian Financial Mechanism 2009–2014 and the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports under Project Contract no. MSMT-28477/2014 within the HaBiT Project 7F14047.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Informatics, Natural Language Processing Centre, Masaryk University, Botanická 68a, 602 00, Brno, Czech Republic

    Marek Medved’ & Aleš Horák

Authors
  1. Marek Medved’
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  2. Aleš Horák
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Marek Medved’ .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Masaryk University , Brno, Czech Republic

    Petr Sojka

  2. Masaryk University , Brno, Czech Republic

    Aleš Horák

  3. Masaryk University , Brno, Czech Republic

    Ivan Kopeček

  4. Masaryk University , Brno, Czech Republic

    Karel Pala

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Medved’, M., Horák, A. (2016). AQA: Automatic Question Answering System for Czech. In: Sojka, P., Horák, A., Kopeček, I., Pala, K. (eds) Text, Speech, and Dialogue. TSD 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9924. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45510-5_31

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45510-5_31

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-45509-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-45510-5

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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