Skip to main content

Text-to-Text Generation for Question Answering

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
Interactive Multi-modal Question-Answering

Abstract

When answering questions, major challenges are (a) to carefully determine the content of the answer and (b) phrase it in a proper way. In IMIX, we focus on two text-to-text generation techniques to accomplish this: content selection and sentence fusion. Using content selection, we can extend answers to an arbitrary length, providing not just a direct answer but also related information so to better address the user’s information need. In this process, we use a graph-based model to generate coherent answers. We then apply sentence fusion to combine partial answers from different sources into a single more complete answer, at the same time avoiding redundancy. The fusion process involves syntactic parsing, tree alignment and surface string generation.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 84.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 109.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 109.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  • Bakshi K, Huynh D, Katz B, Karger D, Lin J, Quan D, Sinha V (2003) The role of context in question answering systems. In: CHI ’03 extended abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, New York, NY, USA, pp 1006–1007

    Google Scholar 

  • Barzilay R (2003) Information fusion for multidocument summarization. PhD thesis, Columbia University

    Google Scholar 

  • Barzilay R, Elhadad M (1997) Using lexical chains for text summarization. In: Proceedings of the ACL workshop on Intelligent Scalable Text Summarization, pp 10–17

    Google Scholar 

  • Barzilay R, McKeown K (2005) Sentence fusion for multidocument news summarization. Computational Linguistics 31(3):297–328

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Barzilay R, McKeown K, Elhaded M (1999) Information fusion in the context of multi-document summarization. In: Proceedings of the 37th annual meeting of the ACL, Maryland

    Google Scholar 

  • Bates M (1990) The berry-picking search: user interface design. In: Thimbleby H (ed) User Interface Design, Addison-Wesley

    Google Scholar 

  • Blair-Goldensohn S, McKeown K (2006) Integrating rhetorical-semantic relation models for query-focused summarization. In: Proceedings of the Document Understanding Conference

    Google Scholar 

  • Bouma G, van Noord G, Malouf R (2001) Alpino: Wide-coverage computational analysis of Dutch. In: Proceedings of CLIN

    Google Scholar 

  • Carbonell J, Goldstein J (1998) The use of MMR, diversity-based reranking for reordering documents and producing summaries. In: Proceedings of the 21st Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, New York, NY, USA, pp 335–336

    Google Scholar 

  • Carletta J (1996) Assessing agreement on classification tasks: the kappa statistic. Compututational Linguistics 22(2):249–254

    Google Scholar 

  • Daum´e III H, Marcu D (2004) Generic sentence fusion is an ill-defined summarization task. In: Proceedings of the ACL workshop: Text Summarization Branches Out, Barcelona, Spain

    Google Scholar 

  • Edmundson HP (1969) New methods in automatic extracting. Journal of the ACM 16(2):264–285

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  • Erkan G, Radev D (2004) LexRank: Graph-based centrality as salience in text summarization. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research

    Google Scholar 

  • Gildea D (2003) Loosely tree-based alignment for machine translation. In: Proceedings of the 41st annual meeting of the ACL, Sapporo, Japan

    Google Scholar 

  • Krahmer E, Marsi E, van Pelt P (2008) Query-based sentence fusion is better defined and leads to more preferred results than generic sentence fusion. In: Proceedings of the 46th Annual Meeting of the ACL, Columbus, OH, USA, pp 193–196

    Google Scholar 

  • Langkilde I, Knight K (1998) Generation that exploits corpus-based statistical knowledge. In: Proceedings of the 36th annual meeting of the ACL, Morristown, NJ, USA, pp 704–710

    Google Scholar 

  • Lin CY (2004) Rouge: a package for automatic evaluation of summaries. In: Proceedings of the ACL workshop: Text Summarization Branches Out, Barcelona, Spain

    Google Scholar 

  • Luhn H (1958) The automatic creation of literature abstracts. IBM Journal of Research and Development 2(2):159–165

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  • Mani I, Bloedorn E (1997) Multi-document summarization by graph search and matching. In: Proceedings of the Fourteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pp 622–628

    Google Scholar 

  • Mann W, Thompson S (1988) Rhetorical Structure Theory: Toward a functional theory of text organization. Text 8:243–281

    Google Scholar 

  • Marcu D (1999) Discourse trees are good indicators of importance in text. In: Mani I, Maybury M (eds) Advances in Automatic Text Summarization, MIT Press, pp 123–136

    Google Scholar 

  • Marsi E, Krahmer E (2005a) Classification of semantic relations by humans and machines. In: Proceedings of the ACL workshop on Empirical Modeling of Semantic Equivalence and Entailment, Ann Arbor, Michigan, pp 1–6

    Google Scholar 

  • Marsi E, Krahmer E (2005b) Explorations in sentence fusion. In: Proceedings of the 10th European workshop on Natural Language Generation, Aberdeen, UK

    Google Scholar 

  • Marsi E, Krahmer E (2007) Annotating a parallel monolingual treebank with semantic similarity relations. In: Proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Treebanks and Linguistic Theories, Bergen, Norway, pp 85–96

    Google Scholar 

  • Marsi E, Krahmer E (2009) Detecting semantic overlap: A parallel monolingual treebank for dutch. In: Proceedings of CLIN

    Google Scholar 

  • Marsi E, Krahmer E (2010) Automatic analysis of semantic similarity in comparable text through syntactic tree matching. In: Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Beijing, China, pp 752–760

    Google Scholar 

  • Maybury M (2004) New Directions in Question Answering. AAAI Press

    Google Scholar 

  • Meyers A, Yangarber R, Grisham R (1996) Alignment of shared forests for bilingual corpora. In: Proceedings of 16th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Copenhagen, Denmark, pp 460–465

    Google Scholar 

  • Noreen EW (1989) Computer intensive methods for testing hypotheses: an introduction. Wiley, New York, NY, USA

    Google Scholar 

  • Och FJ, Ney H (2000) Statistical machine translation. In: EAMT Workshop, Ljubljana, Slovenia, pp 39–46

    Google Scholar 

  • Porter M (2001) Snowball: A language for stemming algorithms. http://snowball.tartarus.org/texts/introduction.html

  • Sp¨arck Jones K (1972) A statistical interpretation of term specificity and its application in retrieval. Journal of Documentation 28(1):11–21

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Strzalkowski T, Gaizauskas R, Voorhees E, Harabagiu S, Weishedel R, Israel D, Jacquemin C, Lin C, Maiorano S, Miller G, Moldovan D, Ogden B, Prager J, Riloff E, Burger J, Singhal A, Cardie C, Shrihari R, Chaudhri V (2000) Issues, tasks, and program structures to roadmap research in question & answering (Q&A). NIST

    Google Scholar 

  • Vossen P (ed) (1998) EuroWordNet: a multilingual database with lexical semantic networks. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Norwell, MA, USA Wolf F, Gibson E (2005) Representing discourse coherence: A corpus-based study. Computational Linguistics 31(2):249–288

    Google Scholar 

  • van der Wouden T, Hoekstra H, Moortgat M, Renmans B, Schuurman I (2002) Syntactic analysis in the spoken dutch corpus. In: Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, Las Palmas, Spain, pp 768–773

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Wauter Bosma .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Bosma, W., Marsi, E., Krahmer, E., Theune, M. (2011). Text-to-Text Generation for Question Answering. In: van den Bosch, A., Bouma, G. (eds) Interactive Multi-modal Question-Answering. Theory and Applications of Natural Language Processing. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-17525-1_6

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-17525-1_6

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-17524-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-17525-1

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics