
A Neural Network for Factoid Question Answering Over Paragraphs - vierja
https://cs.umd.edu/~miyyer/qblearn/
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nl
This is pretty impressive. It beats average human performance in the history
category, but is outperformed by humans in literature.

Note that part of the data preparation process includes building a dependency-
parse tree. From the abstract I'd thought the model was learning to do that
too, which would have been _very_ impressive.

In general this approach is somewhat related to [1] in that both rely on
knowledge representation similarities. I'm not entirely clear about how this
groups approach interfaces the learned model and the IR querying.

[1] _Open Question Answering with Weakly Supervised Embedding Models_
[http://arxiv.org/pdf/1404.4326v1.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1404.4326v1.pdf)

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Terr_
"Correctly"/traditonally speaking, "factoid" does _not_ mean "small fact".

It actually means something that _appears_ to be a fact, but is not. For
example, the statement that "Lightning never strikes twice in the same place."

Interestingly, the phrase "A factoid is a small fact" is a factoid...
regardless of whether you use the slang definition or not.

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_0ffh
Upvote, because correct and precise language matters.

The -oid suffix means 'having the form or likeness of'.

Androids are not small men.

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cbd1984
"Correctness" is determined by usage, and in this case usage has decided that
"Factoid" means small fact. If you use it in any other way, people will
misunderstand you, which is an impediment to comprehension. Explaining
yourself is an impediment to having an actual conversation, as it derails the
conversation.

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_0ffh
Usage is floating and amenable to change. At some point usage was different
from what you claim it is now (do you have sources to back that up, btw?). The
"small fact" people sure didn't let 'em stop that from using the word wrongly
(at that point of time, at least, "small fact" was wrong according to your
definition, also).

Edit: I checked the Merriam-Webster, and there at least the classic definition
is listed as the primary meaning. The alleged "current use" is listed as
secondary. I think we can agree your claim to be a factoid - we just can't
agree on what that means! :)

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gojomo
It would really be interesting to see a "computers-on-Jeopardy" competition
that was open to all comers. (The 'Watson' appearance, while impressive in
many ways, was essentially a contrived IBM infomercial.)

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silentrob
I think you are describing TREC[1]. Over on the chatbot arena, there is The
Loebner Prize[2], also interesting, but in general the systems are over
learned.

[1] [http://trec.nist.gov/](http://trec.nist.gov/) [2]
www.loebner.net/Prizef/loebner-prize.html

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gojomo
TREC, as far as I know, doesn't have a competitive question-answering format,
with definitive right or wrong answers.

Jeopardy is a widely-understood game format; a competition-via-API would be
understandable to a wide variety of competitors, from leading researchers to
precocious cranks.

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nl
There's TREC QA, which finished in 2007[1]. This year they are doing TREC Live
QA[2] (which looks pretty challenging!)

Outside TREC, there is the CLEF QA track[3]

[1]
[http://trec.nist.gov/data/qamain.html](http://trec.nist.gov/data/qamain.html)

[2]
[https://sites.google.com/site/trecliveqa2015/](https://sites.google.com/site/trecliveqa2015/)

[3] [http://nlp.uned.es/clef-qa/](http://nlp.uned.es/clef-qa/)

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newman8r
Nice to see they have links to the datasets. Definitely the type of thing to
be combining with the always-listening devices

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bjwbell
Yep, I can see it now. Overhearing conversation about getting high and food
and saying "Do you want the 2-day or 1-day premium shipping for your marijuana
+ cheetos order?" ;-)

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plongeur
Could somebody explain to me what those arrows next to the heatmap are
supposed to represent?

Why does "left" link to "avoids" link to "by" etc.?

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allworknoplay
Nice work guys!

