Manuel Kirschner


2010

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Towards an Empirically Motivated Typology of Follow-Up Questions: The Role of Dialogue Context
Manuel Kirschner | Raffaella Bernardi
Proceedings of the SIGDIAL 2010 Conference

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Context Fusion: The Role of Discourse Structure and Centering Theory
Raffaella Bernardi | Manuel Kirschner | Zorana Ratkovic
Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10)

Questions are not asked in isolation. Their context, viz. the preceding interactions, might be of help to understand them and retrieve the correct answer. Previous research in Interactive Question Answering showed that context fusion has a big potential to improve the performance of answer retrieval. In this paper, we study how much context, and what elements of it, should be considered to answer Follow-Up Questions (FU Qs). Following previous research, we exploit Logistic Regression Models to learn aspects of dialogue structure relevant to answering FU Qs. We enrich existing models based on shallow features with deep features, relying on the theory of discourse structure of (Chai and Jin, 2004), and on Centering Theory, respectively. Using models trained on realistic IQA data, we show which of the various theoretically motivated features hold up against empirical evidence. We also show that, while these deep features do not outperform the shallow ones on their own, an IQA system's answer correctness increases if the shallow and deep features are combined.

2009

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Exploring Topic Continuation Follow-up Questions using Machine Learning
Manuel Kirschner | Raffaella Bernardi
Proceedings of Human Language Technologies: The 2009 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Companion Volume: Student Research Workshop and Doctoral Consortium

2008

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Context Modelling for IQA: the Role of Tasks and Entities
Raffaella Bernardi | Manuel Kirschner
Coling 2008: Proceedings of the workshop on Knowledge and Reasoning for Answering Questions

2007

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An Empirical View on IQA Follow-up Questions
Manuel Kirschner | Raffaella Bernardi
Proceedings of the 8th SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue