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Question Answering and Information Retrieval Repository

Submitted by pizzato on 9. May 2006 - 19:26.
This page is a repository of links and information regarding relevant areas to my PhD research, i.e. Information Retrieval and Question Answering. Please note that this page is in constant development, therefore keep track of updates. If you have any suggestion please feel free to add a comment or just send me an email at pizzato (at) ics.mq.edu.au.

Question Answering

Question Answering (QA) is the field of research that focuses on finding natural language answers to natural language questions. For instance, the question "Who is the prime minister of Australia?" should provide the name of the prime minister (John Howard at present time) with documents supporting the answer. Some Web Search companies have focused in answering this kind of questions using encyclopedia information. You may want to check the result for this question using Google, MSNSearch and Ask.com.
This is a compilation of links to QA projects and systems available on the Web. The first item links to TellMe QA System which is a prototype system that I developed. In spite of the fact that it is a nice system, don't expect amazing results from it since sometimes it may be offline and it is kind of slow.
Beside myself and my supervisor Diego Mollá-Aliod several other people are working on Question Answering. Here is a list of people and their webpages. If you are one of them and you name is or isn't included in this list please drop me a line by email or by commenting this page.
The next collection of links are general information on QA from other sources. Here you find encyclopedia links, presentations, lectures, and other types of relevant information.

Information Retrieval

Information Retrieval (IR) is the area of research that focuses on providing relevant information to an user input using a large collection of documents. The user input is normally a set of keywords that may represent the information he/she is looking for. The term Information Retrieval is often used to describe Document Retrieval, so in many places these terms are interchangeable.
In question answering the user's information need is expressed using a full sentence in a language like English or Portuguese. Traditional techniques for IR don't utilize many natural language processing (NLP) techniques, however since both fields work with language they are often related.
In the same fashion as the QA section I will introduce some links for IR. Let's start with some IR systems.
Here is a list of the main people working on Information Retrieval. I don't intend to include everyone for obvious reasons but if you believe I forgot someone, please let me know.
The next collection of links are general information on IR from other sources. As before, here you find encyclopedia links, presentations, lectures, and other types of relevant information.

Conferences

One important source of information are conferences and research journals. Here is a compilation of important past and future conferences and active scientific journals that are extremely relevant to the fields of Computational Linguistics and Information Retrieval.
  • ACL 2006 - In Sydney!
  • IR4QA: Information Retrieval for Question Answering Workshop
  • The Association for Computational Linguistics
  • Text REtrieval Conference (TREC)
  • The Association of Logic, Language and Information
  • The ACM's Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval
  • The Australasian Language Technology Association
  • The ARC Network in Human Communication Science
  • The Cross-Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF)