Answer yes/no queries in search engines

According to the query logs in search engines, yes/no questions are issued frequently. One example yes/no question is “is Obama the 42nd president of the United States”, and the expected answer is “No”. However, the most advanced search engines only return a list of ranked documents containing the keywords within the query. Then users have to go through those returned documents in order to figure out one simple answer “No”. People may argue that this query contains semantic and it can hardly be handled by search engines. Nevertheless, current search engines have the ability to process most of the natural language questions. For instance, issuing the query “who is the 42nd president of the United States” on Google, the answer is “Bill Clinton”. Therefore, current search engines should have the ability to handle most of the yes/no queries. Based on the answer of “who is the 42nd president of the United States”, the answer of “is Obama the 42nd president of the United States” should be easily obtained. Thus, current search engines can answer most of the yes/no questions. The ability of the answering yes/no questions will enhance the power of current search engines and will significantly improve the users’ search experiences. Yes/no queries can be divided into two categories objective yes/no queries (OYN questions) and subjective yes/no queries (SYN questions). • The answers of OYN queries are simple “Yes” or “No” with evidences, which can be obtained based on existing facts. For example the answer to the OYN question “is universal studios hollywood open now?” is “Yes” if the following two facts are gained. (1) The open time of Universal Studios Hollywood is 9AMĺC10PM from Monday to Friday, and (2) it is 9:30AM Monday now. The answer becomes “No” if now is “11PM Monday”. • The answers of SYN queries are (Y es,Py) and (No,Pn) pairs with evidences, where Py and Pn are the probability of the answers to be “yes” and “no” respectively. There are no facts for such queries, but user subjective opinions. For example the answer to the SYN question “is ios better than android” is “(Yes, 55%), (No, 45%)” based on analyzing users’ comments, tweets and blogs. Architecture of processing yes/no queries. Figure 1 shows the architecture of processing yes/no queries. The Query Analyzer analyzes the query to identify the type. One possible solution is to check whether it contains subjective terms like comparison terms, e.g., “better than” and “good”. But it is not an accurate measurement, as such terms can sometimes be a non. E.g., query “is good an English word?” is a OYN query even it contains term “good”. To improve the accuracy of query type identification, query logs should be utilized. Based on query logs, if a similar query “is bad an English word” is an OYN query, then “is good an English word?” is an OYN with high probability. The Context Manager collects users’ time-spatial information and also relevant documents from search engines via keyword search. Time-spatial information is served as filter condition, while keyword search returns only relevant context of queries. For example, in order to answer the query “is it rainy today”, the following three information should be obtained: (1) today’s date, e.g., 8/1/2016, which is the time information, (2) user’s location, e.g., New York, which is the spatial information, and (3) the weather of New York on 8/1/2016. The OYN/SYN Processor processes the OYN and SYN queries based on the corresponding context and query types, and returns answers in corresponding format. Query Analyzer SYN OYN Processor SYN Processor Search Engines Spatial/time Monitor Context Manager OYN OYN context SYN context Yes/No + evidences (Yes,Py), (No, Pn) + evidences query is Obama the 42nd president of the United States No Obama is the 44th president of the United States Clinton is the 42nd president of the United States More about Bill Clinton and Barack Obama Figure 1: Architecture of processing yes/no queries. Results exhibit Figure 2(a) shows an example output format for a OYN query “is it rainy today”, while Figure 2(b) demonstrates an example result of an SYN query “is ios better than android”. The outputs directly answer yes/no queries. Users can also see more details to see the evidences. Query Analyzer SYN OYN Processor SYN Processor Search Engines Spatial/time Monitor Context Manager OYN OYN context SYN context Yes/No + evidences (Yes,Py), (No, Pn) + evidences query is Obama the 42nd president of the United States No Obama is the 44th president of the United States Clinton is the 42nd president of the United States More about Bill Clinton and Barack Obama