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The inherent difficulty of knowledge specification and the lack of trained specialists are some of the key obstacles on the way to making intelligent systems based on the knowledge representation and reasoning (KRR) paradigm commonplace. Knowledge and query authoring using natural language, especially controlled natural language (CNL), is one of the promising approaches that could enable domain experts, who are not trained logicians, to both create formal knowledge and query it. In previous work, we introduced the KALM system (Knowledge Authoring Logic Machine) that supports knowledge authoring (and simple querying) with very high accuracy that at present is unachievable via machine learning approaches. The present paper expands on the question answering aspect of KALM and introduces KALM-QA (KALM for Question Answering) that is capable of answering much more complex English questions. We show that KALM-QA achieves 100% accuracy on an extensive suite of movie-related questions, called MetaQA, which contains almost 29,000 test questions and over 260,000 training questions. We contrast this with a published machine learning approach, which falls far short of this high mark.
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Evaluation Paradigms in Question Answering
Question answering (QA) primarily descends from two branches of research: (1) Alan Turing’s investigation of machine intelligence at Manchester University and (2) Cyril Cleverdon’s comparison of library card catalog indices at Cranfield University. This position paper names and distinguishes these paradigms. Despite substantial overlap, subtle but significant distinctions exert an outsize influence on research. While one evaluation paradigm values creating more intelligent QA systems, the other paradigm values building QA systems that appeal to users. By better understanding the epistemic heritage of QA, researchers, academia, and industry can more effectively accelerate QA research.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1822494
- PAR ID:
- 10309823
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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The inherent difficulty of knowledge specification and the lack of trained specialists are some of the key obstacles on the way to making intelligent systems based on the knowledge representation and reasoning (KRR) paradigm commonplace. Knowledge and query authoring using natural language, especially controlled natural language (CNL), is one of the promising approaches that could enable domain experts, who are not trained logicians, to both create formal knowledge and query it. In previous work, we introduced the KALM system (Knowledge Authoring Logic Machine) that supports knowledge authoring (and sim- ple querying) with very high accuracy that at present is unachievable via machine learning approaches. The present paper expands on the question answering aspect of KALM and introduces KALM-QA (KALM for Question Answering) that is capable of answering much more complex English questions. We show that KALM-QA achieves 100% accuracy on an extensive suite of movie-related questions, called MetaQA, which contains almost 29,000 test questions and over 260,000 training questions. We contrast this with a published machine learning approach, which falls far short of this high mark.more » « less
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.758
