Towards Natural Interactive Question Answering

Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2006)

Abstract

Interactive question answering systems should allow users to lead a coherent information seeking dialogue. Compared with systems that only locally evaluate a question, interactive systems facilitate the information seeking process and provide a more natural feel. We show that by extending a QA system to handle several types of anaphora and ellipsis, the naturalness of the interaction can be considerably improved. We describe an implementation in our prototype QA system for German and give a walk-through example of the enhanced interaction capabilities.