Presentation held by Zhong Wang and Zhimeng Chen at the Agricultural Ontology Service (AOS) Workshop 2012 in Kutching, Sarawak, Malaysia from September 3 - 4, 2012

1. Proposing A Semantic Multilingual Social Question
Answering Service for Global Agricultural Practitioners:
from Perspective of End Users
Zhong WANG and Zhimeng CHEN
Sept 4, 2012 Kuching, Malaysia

2. Contents
 Brief on Question Answering (QA) Services
 QA for agricultural practitioners? - A case study
 Draft proposing
 Discussions and Conclusions

3. Brief on QA services

4. QA research and service
fact, list, definition, How , Why, hypothetical,
semantically constrained, and cross-lingual
Arbitrary question
Search
QA
service (un)structured
End user Answer Data
Relevant information
1. http://en.wikipedia.or g/wiki/Question_answering

5. Experienced services
 keyword input (automatic)
 search engine (SE)  list of information
 Knowledge portals  list of fact
 Natural language input (automatic/ human involved)
 Text/syntactic analysis  actual answer (TREC QA track data)
 Entity/semantic analysis  list of linked entities
 Community/social people  unpredicted result

6. Social QA service
 a large number of real persons, entities, and relations/links
 Exciting part:
 Fast speed of information transfer
 Dynamic increase and update of contents
 Surprises from time to time
 Not so exciting:
 Unknown responding time
 Unknown content quality
Maria Soledad Pera and Yiu-Kai Ng,
A Community Question-Answering Refinement System.
HT’11, June 6–9, 2011, Eindhoven, The Netherlands. The 22nd ACM Hypertext Conference

7. QA case in the Ag sector
 Questions from a particular field farmer
 in local spoken language
 Insufficient/unclear descriptions
 Impatient
 Answers from the local service agent
 piece of cake  knows well
 wait a moment  not for sure New question
generated
 does not know  where to find it?

8. QA and agricultural practitioners?
- A case study

9. The Question
 “where can I find some information on rice cultivation
in the dry area of Africa?”
 Feedbacks against the NL input
 Search Engine
 Knowledge portal
 SQA site

10. SE: Google
 List of candidate links
 Related may pumps
up on the top if lucky
 Clicks into for …

11. Knowledge Portal: WolframAlpha
 Text parsing
 Entity facts list
 Nothing to do with the question

12. Facebook QA App
 Where is my social
friends?

13. Chacha.com (查查  look it up)
 What is it talking
about?
 The promised
proper answer is
still “on the way”…

14. Quora.com
 No one cares at all
until you pay the
credits …

15. Yahoo! Answers
 You can wait but it
will keep your
question live for 4
days only

16. Ask.com
 Nearly instant
feedbacks
 Two similar
feedbacks

17. Hightable.com
 some serious
feedbacks
 further discussions
inspired
 not for sure if it
what I want

18. Feedback summary

19. Divergent feedbacks
 General-purposed sites
 not an exciting topic attract people
 People answers for credits
 90-9-1 Rule
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/participation_inequality.html

20. Participants of Quora.com
 Multiple roles
 Knowledgable
participants
http://blog.kissmetrics.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/world-of-quora.pdf

21. Draft proposing

22. Resources required
 People  who know the question well, or
 Domain relations  know other entities that are easily located for
further help
 Comprehensive but structured feedbacks relevant info still
valuable beside the actual answer
 Worldwide  connecting people speaking different language

23. We almost have them already
 People  Ag communities worldwide
 Domain relations  AGROVOC, Linked Ag Data, AGRIVIVO
 Comprehensive but structured feedbacks OpenAgris,
AgriDrupal (w/ QA module), AgHarvest
 Worldwide  Statistical Machine Translation Services (SMTS)

24. (LOA: PO245395)
A Data Input System that Evaluates and Tests
Existing Technology of Machine Translation
from Chinese to English and Vise Versa
More on SMTS

25. What does it look like?
Africa China
Local AgIS QA Local AgIS QA
System System
End user (AgriDrupal) (AgriDrupal) End user
Local DB in Local DB in
French Chinese
(AgriVIVO)
Multilingual and Semantic Linked
Agricultural Dataset

26. What can we expect?
 People in this domain
 More convergent answers
 Knowledge from colleagues world wide
 Faster responses

27. Discussions and Conclusions

28. Promotions and Sustainability
 SQA is Obtaining more attentions:
http://a09.yrl.bf1.yahoo.com/workshops/cqa2012/

29. Promotions and Sustainability
 It is necessary to develop, deploy and evaluate
SQA service
 The most direct way to make semantic techniques to
benefit the end users
 User growth

30. Thanks!