A structural support vector method for extracting contexts and answers of questions from online forums

This article addresses the issue of extracting contexts and answers of questions from posts of online discussion forums. In previous work, general-purpose graphical models have been employed without any customization to this specific extraction problem. Instead, in this article, we propose a unified...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Information processing & management 2011-11, Vol.47 (6), p.886-898
Main Authors: Cao, Yunbo, Yang, Wen-Yun, Lin, Chin-Yew, Yu, Yong
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Approximation
Automatic text analysis
Customizing
Extraction
Information extraction
Information processing
Information retrieval
Mathematical analysis
Natural language processing
On-line systems
Online
Online information retrieval
Optimization
Optimization algorithms
Question answering
Questions
Sentences
Studies
Virtual communities
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:This article addresses the issue of extracting contexts and answers of questions from posts of online discussion forums. In previous work, general-purpose graphical models have been employed without any customization to this specific extraction problem. Instead, in this article, we propose a unified approach to context and answer extraction by customizing the structural support vector machine method. The customization enables our proposal to explore various relations among sentences of posts and complex structures of threads. We design new inference algorithms to find or approximate the most violated constraint by utilizing the specific structure of forum threads, which enables us to efficiently find the global optimum of the customized optimizing problem. We also optimize practical performance measures by varying loss functions. Experimental results show that our methods are both promising and flexible.
ISSN:0306-4573
1873-5371
DOI:10.1016/j.ipm.2010.06.004