National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, Incorporated

Takuya Kawada

Kentaro Torisawa

Julien Kloetzer

Jun Goto

Chikara Hashimoto

Jonghoon Oh

Junichi Kazama

Stijn De Saeger

Yiou Wang

An entailment pattern pair extension apparatusextends entailment pairs by generating an n-term entailment pair from an m-term entailment pair, where m and n are integers not smaller than 0 and satisfying m&#x3c;n. Each entailment pair includes a first language pattern and a second language pattern entailed by the first language pattern. Entailment pattern pair extension apparatusincludes: a generation rule storage unitstoring generation rules for generating n-term entailment pairs from m-term entailment pairs, and a binary pair adding unitreceiving m-term entailment pair, determining, for each generation rule stored in the generation rule storage unit, whether its condition is satisfied by the m-term pair, and if the condition is satisfied, applying a modification rule of the generation rule to each language pattern constituting the m-term entailment pair.

Entailment pair extension apparatus, computer program therefor and question-answering system

[Object] To provide a device assisting a user to easily generate, in relation to an issue of interest to the user, a question sentence guaranteed to have an answer of a certain accuracy or higher in a question-answering system. [Solution] A question sentence generating device is used with a question-answering system, and it includes: word receiving means for receiving a wordas a source for generating a question sentence; and question sentence generating databasecomprised of a plurality of entries for generating a question sentence. Each of the plurality of entries has a word as a key and includes an answer sentence pattern co-occurring with the word, used in the question-answering system. The question sentence generating device further includes a question sentence generating unit, searching the question sentence generating databasefor an answer sentence pattern using the wordreceived by the word receiving means as a key, for generating a question sentence from a retrieved answer sentence pattern and the received word

Question sentence generating device and computer program

In order to provide a non-factoid question answering system with improved precision, the question answering system () includes: a candidate retrieving unit (), responsive to a question, extracting answer candidates from a corpus storage (); a feature vector generating unit () for generating features from combinations of a question with each of the answer candidates; SVMs () trained to calculate a score of how correct a combination of the question with an answer candidate is, upon receiving the feature vector therefor; and an answer ranker unit () outputting the answer candidate with the highest calculated score as the answer. The features are generated on the basis of the results of morphological analysis and parsing of the question, a phrase in the question evaluated as being positive or negative as well as its polarity, and the semantic classes of nouns in the features.

Non-factoid question-answering system and computer program

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Tokyo, Japan

Takuya Kawada