Ontologies and Adaptivity in Dialogue for Question Answering

Question answering (QA) has become one of the fastest growing topics in computational linguistics and information access. To advance research in the area of dialogue-based question answering, we propose a combination of methods from different scientific fields (i.e., information retrieval, dialogue systems, semantic web and machine learning). This book sheds light on adaptable dialogue-based question answering. We demonstrate the technical and computational feasibility of the proposed ideas, the introspective methods in particular, by beginning with an extensive introduction to the dialogical problem domain which motivates the technical implementation. The ideas have been carried out in a mature natural language processing (NLP) system, the SmartWeb dialogue system, which was developed between 2004 and 2007 by partners from academia and industry. We have attempted to make this book a self-containing text and provide an extra section on the interdisciplinary scientific background. The target audience for this book comprises of researchers and students interested in the application potential of semantic technologies for difficult AI tasks such as working dialogue and QA systems.