Pavel Braslavski (Ural Federal University, SKB Kontur) Questions Online: What, Where, and Why Should we Care? AIST Conference 2015 http://aistconf.org/

1. Questions Online:
What, Where, and
Why Should we Care?
Pavel Braslavski
09/04/2015

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3. QUESTION ANSWERING
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4. Question Answering
• A long tradition of research
• Text document collection + natural language
questions  concise answer
• TREC QA 1999-2007
– text search, some parsing and textual entailment
• Mostly factoids
– How much folic acid should an expectant mother
get daily?
– What is the population of the Bahamas?
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5. QUESTION IN WEB SEARCH
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6. Question Queries (QQ)
• About 2-3% of all queries
• The share is growing (!)
• Somewhat longer
• More unique queries
• Worse results compared to keyword queries
(at least until recently)
• how is the leader (i.e. not factoids)
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8. Question types
как сделать
что такое
как правильно
можно ли
сколько стоит
о чем
что делать
как узнать
как установить
где купить
from 1B Yandex QQ
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9. Why more questions?
• Natural UX
• Low search proficiency
• Users switch to questions when fail to
formulate a good keyword query
• Question + answer online (more later)
• Voice search (!)
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14. Modern Search
• Information need as questions
– More context, relations
• From terms to concepts, from text search to
inference
– Google Knowledge Graph, Facebook Graph Search
(i.e. more knowledge-rich approach)
• Concise answer
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15. QUESTION IN SOCIAL MEDIA
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17. Community QA
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18. CQA-related tasks
• Quality estimation
• Questions & answers recycling
• Expert finding
• Etc.
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19. Real World vs. CQA data
0
0,02
0,04
0,06
0,08
200
400
600
800
1000
1200
ARI rate vs. 'flu' topic
0
0,1
0,2
0,3
0,4
0,5
-2
-1
0
1
2
3
4
5
rain vs. 'runny nose' topic

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Asking Friends

21. Questions on Twitter & FB
• ~3% of tweets convey an information need
• Correlate with search queries
• Recommendations, opinions
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Facebook

22. References
• Children ask Yandex,
https://company.yandex.ru/researches/figures/2013/ya_kids_questions.xml
• Google 2014 Trends: top questions,
https://www.google.com/trends/2014/story/top-questions.html
• Ch. Manning, P. Nayak. Web Question Answering (lecture slides),
http://web.stanford.edu/class/cs276/handouts/lecture19-Web-QA.pptx
• D. Ferrucci et al. Building Watson: An Overview of the DeepQA Project. AI
Magazine, 31(3), 2010.
• A. Shtok et al. Learning from the Past: Answering New Questions with Past
Answers. WWW’2012.
• B. Pang and K. Kumar. Search in the Lost Sense of “Query”: Question Formulation
in Web Search Queries and its Temporal Changes. HLT '2011.
• Z. Zhao and Q. Mei. Questions about questions: An empirical analysis of
information needs on Twitter. WWW 2013.
• Q. Liu et al. When web search fails, searchers become askers: Understanding the
transition. SIGIR’2012.
• M. Ringel Morris, J. Teevan, and K. Panovich. What do people ask their social
networks, and why?: A survey study of status message Q&A behavior. CHI’2010.
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23. • Put RuSSIR pic here
• Annual event
• 100+ participants
• 4th RuSSIR: Voronezh 13-18 September
• http://romip.ru/russir2010/
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RuSSIR 2015
Saint-Petersburg, 24--28 August 2015
Application deadline: 20 April, 2015
http://russir.org

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Pavel Braslavski
pbras@yandex.ru