Research in Question Answering (QA) has been dominated by the TREC methodology of black-box system evaluation. This makes it difficult to evaluate the effectiveness of individual components and requires human involvement. We have collected a set of answer locations within the AQUAINT corpus for a sample of TREC questions, in doing so we also analyse the ability of humans to retrieve answers. Ou...

Community-driven Question Answering (CQA) systems that crowdsource experiential information in the form of questions and answers and have accumulated valuable reusable knowledge. Clustering of QA datasets from CQA systems provides a means of organizing the content to ease tasks such as manual curation and tagging. In this paper, we present a clustering method that exploits the two-part question...

I am in the middle of Manhattan and I am lost. I approach a likely stranger on the road and ask him, pointing to the right: “Is this the way to the railway station?” Discounting for a moment the possibility that I will be ignored and that the stranger will continue on his way (of which the—trivial—game move equivalent would be “I prefer not to answer the question”), I will now get one of three ...

Fine, so what does a population geneticist mean by epistasis? RA Fisher used ‘epistacy’ and later ‘epistasis’ to describe genetic interactions more generally [2]. We think that population geneticists hijacked this term over a decade after its coinage just to confuse the classical geneticists. OK, what does a medical doctor mean by epistasis? A thin film on the surface of a urine specimen. Enoug...

We introduce Question-Answer Meaning Representations (QAMRs), which represent the predicate-argument structure of a sentence as a set of question-answer pairs. We also develop a crowdsourcing scheme to show that QAMRs can be labeled with very little training, and gather a dataset with over 5,000 sentences and 100,000 questions. A detailed qualitative analysis demonstrates that the crowd-generat...

While sentence extraction as an approach to summarization has been shown to work in documents of certain genres, because of the conversational nature of email communication, sentence extraction may not result in a coherent summary. In this paper, we present our work on augmenting extractive summaries of threads of email conversations with automatically detected question-answer pairs. We compare...

In this paper, we propose a novel method using multiple-objective programming problems to answer the following question: if among a group of decision making units (DMUs), a subset of DMUs are required to merge and form a new DMU with specific input/output levels and a predefined efficiency target, how much should be the outputs/inputs of the merged DMU? This question answered according to the c...