Compositional question answering: A divide and conquer approach

Abstract

This paper describes how questions can be characterized for question answering (QA) along different facets and focuses on questions that cannot be answered directly but can be divided into simpler ones so that they can be answered directly using existing QA capabilities. Since individual answers are composed to generate the final answer, we call this process as compositional QA. The goal of the proposed QA method is to answer a composite. question by dividing it into atomic ones, instead of developing an entirely new method tailored for the new question type. A question is analyzed automatically to determine its class, and its sub-questions are sent to the relevant QA modules. Answers returned from the individual QA modules are composed based on the predetermined plan corresponding to the question type. The experimental results based on 615 questions show that the compositional QA approach outperforms the simple routing method by about 17%. Considering 115 composite questions only, the F-score was almost tripled from the baseline. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.