Leveraging Question Answer technology to address terrorism inquiry

This paper investigates the potential use of dialog-based ALICEbots in disseminating terrorism information to the general public. In particular, we study the acceptance and response satisfaction of ALICEbot responses in both the general conversation and terrorism domains. From our analysis of three different knowledge sets: general conversation, terrorism, and combined, we found that users were more favorable to the systems that exhibited conversational flow. We also found that the system that incorporated both conversation and terrorism knowledge performed better than systems with only conversation or terrorism knowledge alone. Lastly, we were interested in what types of questions were the most prevalently used and discovered that questions beginning with ‘wh⁎’ words were the most popular method to start an interrogative sentence. However, ‘wh⁎ sentence starters surprisingly proved to be in a very narrow majority. © 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.