Date of Award
2019
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
M.S. in Engineering Science
Department
Computer and Information Science
First Advisor
Naeemul Hassan
Second Advisor
Yixin Chen
Third Advisor
Dawn Wilkins
Relational Format
dissertation/thesis
Abstract
Question-Answer systems traditionally use expensive and difficult to produce structured knowledge bases. Recent systems have used unstructured natural language sources as their datasets, but most of those sources have been overly broad or difficult to extend. Online forums are a largely untapped source of information that can provide both depth and breadth when limited to a specific domain, as well as being adaptive to the introduction of new information. In this paper, I conjecture that online forums can be similarly and effectively used as an unstructured knowledge base for Question-Answer systems. I use a relatively simple summarization-based approach to analyze the effectiveness of answering questions about history using well-known and popular online forums. The results of the experiment are moderately negative, though further research may need to be performed to determine whether this is a result of the model architecture, the
Recommended Citation
Moore, Kyle, "Building an Automated Q-A System Using Online Forums as Knowledge Bases" (2019). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 1692.
https://egrove.olemiss.edu/etd/1692