Follow-up utterances in QA dialogue

Schooten van, Boris and Akker op den, Rieks (2006) Follow-up utterances in QA dialogue. Traitement Automatique des Langues, 46 (3). pp. 181-206. ISSN 1248-9433

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Abstract:	The processing of user follow-up utterances by a QA system is a topic which is still in its infant stages, but enjoys growing interest in the QA community. In this paper, we discuss the broader issues related to handling follow-up utterances in a real-life "information kiosk" setting. With help of a corpus of follow-up utterances, we lay out a general framework for QA dialogue, and propose a general-coverage classication of real user reactions, based on their function in the dialogue, and their relation to the context of previous utterances. We discuss a dialogue manager we have developed that handles the identied types of follow-up utterances. It uses existing NLP and IR techniques to handle follow-up questions, and generates appropriate dialogue reactions to handle non-follow-up questions. Our main conclusion is that a large part of follow-up utterances can be handled by a set of simple techniques, even though we found it is not easy to determine the exact context in which follow-up questions are to be understood.
Item Type:	Article
Copyright:	© 2006 Editions Lavoisier
Faculty:	Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science (EEMCS)
Research Group:	Human Media Interaction (HMI)
Link to this item:	http://purl.utwente.nl/publications/63437
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