Friday, March 28, 2008

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

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.