Hierarchical context supplementation for consecutive question answering

Abstract

Question-answering (QA) systems have recently shown impressive results in terms of accurately answering user questions in such situations as domain specific user questions. However, we have identified many real situations where QA systems must cope with not a single question-answering situation but rather a sequence of consecutive questions. In such cases, users often ask questions on the basis of the previous answer they have received, so the context of the questions changes on a certain level. The commonly used method to handle this problem when using a QA system is to append the current question to the previous question (append method). However, the append method is not designed to detect such context changes. To deal with such context changes, we have designed a hierarchical context supplementation QA System (HCSQ). The HCSQ handles consecutive questions by matching the current question with the hierarchical domain knowledge database structure of the previous answer and then supplements the context of the current question with the required keywords. We also show that our method can be further applied to the initial question to supplement omitted context. Experimental results show that our method substantially outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.