IR Series - Nico Schlaefer - Friday, April 4, 12:00pm, NSH 3002

[Jonathan Elsas]

Greetings,

Please join us for an upcoming talk from Nico Schlaefer.

Lunch will be provided!

Title:
The Ephyra Question Answering System: Recent Results and Current  
Directions

Who: Nico Schlaefer
When: Friday, April 4, 12:00pm
Where: NSH 3002

Abstract:
This talk gives an overview of recent work on English question  
answering (QA) at CMU and our participation in last year’s TREC  
evaluation. QA is the task of retrieving accurate answers to natural  
language questions from a knowledge source such as the Web. The  
presentation includes a brief introduction to QA and the TREC  
competition, thus prior knowledge on QA is not required though helpful.

The talk focuses on the challenges that an end-to-end QA system needs  
to address, and the architectural and algorithmic solutions  
implemented in Ephyra, our English QA system. Ephyra is a modular and  
extensible framework that facilitates the integration of different QA  
techniques. The system is organized as a pipeline of reusable standard  
components for question analysis, query generation, search, answer  
extraction, and answer selection. The most recent setup combines a  
syntactic pattern learning and matching approach with answer-type  
based extraction techniques and a semantic answer extractor that is  
based on semantic role labeling.

Recently we have placed the Ephyra QA system into open source, making  
most of our code available to the research community. I will discuss  
why we took this step, and how you may benefit from our open source  
system - OpenEphyra* - for your own research.

* http://www.ephyra.info/