Mining semi-structured online knowledge bases to answer natural language questions on community QA websites

Parikshit Sondhi, Cheng Xiang Zhai

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Over the past few years, community QA websites (e.g. Yahoo! Answers) have become a useful platform for users to post questions and obtain answers. However, not all questions posted there receive informative answers or are answered in a timely manner. In this paper, we show that the answers to some of these questions are available in online domain-specific knowledge bases and propose an approach to automatically discover those answers. In the proposed approach, we would first mine appropriate SQL query patterns by leveraging an existing collection of QA pairs, and then use the learned query patterns to answer previously unseen questions by returning relevant entities from the knowledge base. Evaluation on a collection of health domain questions from Yahoo! Answers shows that the proposed method is effective in discovering potential answers to user questions from an online medical knowledge base.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationCIKM 2014 - Proceedings of the 2014 ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages341-350
Number of pages10
ISBN (Electronic)9781450325981
DOIs
StatePublished - Nov 3 2014
Event23rd ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, CIKM 2014 - Shanghai, China
Duration: Nov 3 2014Nov 7 2014

Publication series

NameCIKM 2014 - Proceedings of the 2014 ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management

Other

Other23rd ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, CIKM 2014
Country/TerritoryChina
CityShanghai
Period11/3/1411/7/14

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Information Systems and Management
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Information Systems

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