This paper presents a flexible approach using a utilitybased planner to choose between different extraction methods in a question-answering (QA) system, enabling multiple run-time strategies. We model the QA process as a set of probabilistic actions, and use the planner to select an action sequence maximizing the expected value of information. The planner exploits redundancy and diversity by dy...

In his survey paper on branching programs, Razborov Raz91] asked the following question: Does every rectiier-switching network computing the majority of n bits have size n 1++(1) ? We answer this question in the negative by constructing a simple oblivious branching program of size O n log 3 n log log n log log log n ! for computing any threshold function. This improves the previously best known...

We integrate ontology languages and logic programming (LP) by extending disjunctive logic programs (DLPs) and their semantics in order to support inverses and an infinite universe, without introducing function symbols. We show that this extension is still decidable, and can be used to simulate, on the one hand, answer set programming with a finite universe, and on the other hand, several expres...

We examine the “Guessing Secrets” problem arising in internet routing, in which the goal is to discover two or more objects from a known finite set. We propose a quantum algorithm using O(1) calls to an O(logN) oracle. This improves upon the best known classical result, which uses O(logN) questions and requires an additional O(logN3) steps to produce the answer. In showing the possibilities of ...

This paper describes the work done by ADAPT centre at Dublin City University towards automatically answering questions for the TREC LiveQA track. The system is based on a sentence retrieval approach. In particular, we first use the title of a new question as a query so as to retrieve a ranked list of conceptually similar questions from an index of previously asked on “Yahoo! Answers”. We then e...

In this paper we target Natural Language Understanding in the context of Conversational Agents that answer questions about their topics of expertise, and have in their knowledge base question/answer pairs, limiting the understanding problem to the task of finding the question in the knowledge base that will trigger the most appropriate answer to a given (new) question. We implement such an agen...

Enterprise search differs from Internet search in many ways. The notion of a “good” answer to a query is quite different. On an intranet, the notion of a “good” answer is often defi ned as the “right” answer. Finding the right answer is often more diffi cult than fi nding the best answer. On the other hand, nowadays when searching on Internet, a large amount of information returned for a query,...