Silvia Quarteroni

Readability and QA systems

Today I submitted the final version of my KRAQ paper Incorporating User Models in Question Answering to Improve Readability.
It describes how a user model can be applied to a question answering system in order to filter the output based on the user's reading ability.

ABSTRACT
Most question answering and information retrieval systems are insensitive to different users� needs and preferences, as well as their reading level.
In (Quarteroni and Manandhar, 2006), we introduce a hybrid QA-IR system based on a a user model.
In this paper we focus on how the system filters and re-ranks the search engine results for a query according to their reading difficulty, providing user-tailored answers.
Keywords: question answering, information retrieval, user modelling, readability.

Short paper sent to EACL'06

Last night I sent out the camera ready version of my short paper to appear in the EACL'06 proceedings. I will be presenting it as a poster on April 6th, 2006 at the conference venue under the title: "Adaptivity in Question Answering with User Modelling and a Dialogue Interface".
The paper outlines the general aims of my research and gives the complete framework which I intend to create. The key technologies I want to integrate are question answering, user modelling and dialogue systems.

Unfortunately, the same day I found that there already was an AQUA question answering system and had to come up with a new name in a rush before the submission deadline. AQUA is now officially named "YourQA" (although it will remain AQUA in my heart).

Paper to appear at KRAQ'06

One of my works is going to appear at the KRAQ'06 workshop, which is colocated with EACL'06 this year.

Paper to appear at FLAIRS-19

My paper "User Modelling for Adaptive Question Answering and Information Retrieval " has been accepted to appear at FLAIRS-19, the annual conference of the Florida AI Research Society (member of AAAI).
This year the conference is in Melbourne Beach, FL, on May 11-13.

ABSTRACT
Most question answering (QA) and information retrieval (IR) systems are insensitive to different users� needs and preferences, and also to the existence of multiple, complex or controversial answers.
We propose the notion of adaptivity in QA and IR by introducing a hybrid QA-IR system based on a user model.
Our system filters and re-ranks the query results returned by a search engine according to their topics and reading difficulty, thus providing user-tailored answers.
This is particularly useful in learning environments, to adjust the presentation of information to the different reading levels of pupils.
Keywords: adaptive systems, question answering, information retrieval, user modelling, readability.

Short paper to appear at EACL'06

My short paper "Adaptivity in Question Answering with User Modelling and a Dialogue Interface" has been accepted to appear at the EACL'06 poster session in April in Trento, Italy.

ABSTRACT
Most question answering (QA) and information retrieval (IR) systems are insensitive to different users� needs and preferences, and also to the existence of multiple, complex or controversial answers.
We introduce adaptivity in QA and IR by creating a hybrid system based on a dialogue interface and a user model.

Proofs from THE BOOK now available

The book I have been translating from English into Italian during the last few months has now been published: the title is Proofs from THE BOOK and it is edited by Springer-Verlag Milan.

This is a really interesting work by M. Aigner and G. Ziegler presenting some brilliant proofs to a series of celeber mathematical theorems and conjectures.
It is written in a very lively style (which I hope I have been able to render in Italian) and is in my opinion accessible to anyone with an interest in Mathematics and a basic understanding of it.

A proposito di questo libro

Paul Erdos amava parlare del Libro in cui Dio conserva le dimostrazioni perfette per i teoremi matematici, seguendo il detto di G. H. Hardy secondo il quale non vi � posto perenne per la matematica brutta.
Erdos disse anche che non � necessario credere in Dio, tuttavia in quanto matematici si deve credere nel Libro.
Alcuni anni fa gli autori gli suggerirono di scrivere una prima (e assai modesta) approssimazione del Libro.
Egli fu entusiasta e, come gli era peculiare, si mise immediatamente al lavoro, riempiendo pagine su pagine con i suoi suggerimenti.
Essendo sfortunatamente morto nell'estate del 1996, Paul non compare come co-autore.
Tuttavia questo libro � dedicato alla sua memoria.

Proofs from the Book
Edizione italiana a cura di Alfio Quarteroni
Aigner, Martin, Ziegler, Guenter
2006, Approx. 280 p., Cartonato
ISBN: 88-470-0435-7

My Question Answering system (AQUA) is online!

Lately I have been implementing a question answering system, i.e. an information retrieval system (like Google) which tries to answer a question in a more sophisticated way than just by returning a list of documents.

Its purpose is to return document passages which contain the answers so that a little context is available, but the user doesn't need to scan whole documents.

My system, AQUA (Adaptive QUestion Answering), is now available online at: http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/aig/aqua/

AQUA is able to:
- single out document passages which contain the answers,
- return different sets of answers to users having different reading levels (like kids and teenagers).

I also do other kinds of data processing like clustering the documents based on their topics and highlighting interesting words like proper names, places and organizations.

The system is running on a Java servlet which is still not very stable yet and requires my machine to be turned on, but I've tried it a few times and it seems to work OK.

Translating Springer author instructions

Lately, I have been working on a translation for Springer Italy (the Italian branch of the well-known publishing company).

I was responsible for translating their author instructions from English to Italian for all fields of scientific publications except medicine.
So if you are planning to submit a monograph or a contributed book in Italian using the Springer style, take a close look at the wide range of templates, reference guides and instructions: they were prepared with care .