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2018 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

An Information Retrieval-Based Approach to Table-Based Question Answering

Authors : Junwei Bao, Nan Duan, Ming Zhou, Tiejun Zhao

Published in: Natural Language Processing and Chinese Computing

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

We propose a simple yet effective information retrieval based approach to answer complex questions with open domain web tables. Specifically, given a question and a table, we rank all table cells based on their representations, and select the cells of the highest ranking score as the answer. To represent a cell, we design rich features which leverage both the semantic information of the question and the structure information of the table. The experiments are conducted on WIKITABLEQUESTIONS dataset in which the questions have complex semantics. Compared to a semantic parsing based method, our approach improves the accuracy score by 6.03 points.

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previous chapter Improving Retrieval Quality Using PRF Mechanism from Event Perspective

next chapter Building Emotional Conversation Systems Using Multi-task Seq2Seq Learning

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_(information).

A relation can be >, <, \(=\) or \(\ne \).

An attribute can be an attribute in the table, or Count which counts the number of rows that a cell value appears in, or Index which returns the row index of a cell.

https://github.com/percyliang/sempre.

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Title: An Information Retrieval-Based Approach to Table-Based Question Answering
Authors: Junwei Bao
Nan Duan
Ming Zhou
Tiejun Zhao
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
Book: Natural Language Processing and Chinese Computing
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-73617-4

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-319-73618-1

Copyright Year: 2018
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73618-1_50

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