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<Paper uid="N06-4010">
  <Title>Factoid Question Answering with Web, Mobile and Speech Interfaces</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="288" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The approach to factoid question answering (QA) that we adopt was first described in (Whittaker et al., 2005b) where the details of the mathematical model and how it was trained for English were given. The approach has been successfully evaluated in the 2005 text retrieval conference (TREC) question answering track evaluations (Voorhees and Trang Dang, 2005) where our group placed eleventh out of thirty participants (Whittaker et al., 2005a).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Although the TREC QA task is substantially different to web-based QA this evaluation showed that our approach works and provides an objective assessment of its quality. Similarly, for our Japanese language system we have evaluated the performance of our approach on the NTCIR-3 QAC-1 task (Whittaker et al., 2005c). Although our Japanese experiments were applied retrospectively, the results would have placed us in the mid-range of participating systems. In (Whittaker et al., 2006b) we described how our approach could be used for the rapid development of web-based QA systems in five very different languages. It was shown that a developer proficient with the tools, and with access to suitable training data, could build a system in a new language in around 10 hours. In (Whittaker et al., 2006a) we evaluated the performance of the systems for four of our five languages. We give a brief summary of our approach to QA in Section 2.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> In this paper we introduce our web-based QA system which is publicly accessible at http://asked.jp, permitting questions in English, Japanese, Chinese, Russian and Swedish and  is discussed in Section 3. Since answers in factoid QA are inherently well-suited to display on small screens we have also made a mobile-phone interface which is accessible at the same address when using an HTML browser from a mobile phone. This is discussed in Section 4. There are several other QA systems on the web including Brainboost (Brainboost, 2005) and Lexxe (Lexxe, 2005) but they only try to answer questions in English and do not have convenient mobile interfaces.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> Entering whole questions rather than just key-words is tedious especially on a mobile-phone so we have also begun to look at speech interfaces. In this paper we describe a prototype speech interface to our English-language QA system. This prototype is currently intended primarily as a platform for further research into speech recognition and answering of questions from an acoustic modelling point-of-view (e.g. low-bandwidth, low-quality VoIP channel), from a language modelling perspective (e.g. irregular word order in questions vs. text, and very large out-of-vocabulary problem) and also in terms of dialog modelling. There have been several attempts at speech interfaces to QA systems in the literature e.g. (Schofield and Zheng, 2003) but as far as we know ours is the only system that is publicly accessible. We discuss this interface in Section 5.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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