ICT Researchers Win Best Poster Award at Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference

Work by ICT researchers Grace Chen, Emma Tosch, Ron Artstein, Anton Leuski, and David Traum received the Best Paper Award at the 24th Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference (FLAIRS-24) held in Palm Beach, Florida, May 18 – 20, 2011. The poster, Evaluating Conversational Characters Created through Question Generation describes research the team conducted using question generation tools to turn encyclopedia articles into question-answer knowledge bases for conversational characters.  Characters were tested by collecting questions and answers from naive participants, running the questions through the character, and comparing the system responses to the participant answers. Characters gave a good or decent answer to 56% of the user questions which had an answer available in the source text, and 43% of all questions asked. Answer quality varied by question type: the best results were answers to who questions, while answers to yes/no questions were among the poorer performers. The results show that question generation is a promising method for creating a question answering conversational character from an existing text.
Congrats to all!