About

I am a final year PhD student in the KRDB Center, Faculty of Computer Science, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano. I am working with Raffaella Bernardi, Marco Baroni and Massimo Poesio. We have been cooperating with the University library on a project to build a multi-lingual Interactive Question-Answering (IQA) system (BoB, the Bozen/Bolzano ChatBot). Since publicly launching this system, we have been using its dialogue log files to study naturally occurring IQA dialogues, where our special interest lies in the Follow-Up Questions that users have asked. We have been experimenting with empirically based models that capture the role of the dialogue context for answering Follow-Up Questions. Our results are of both theoretical and practical interest: they describe the inherent structure of realistic IQA dialogues in terms of (shallow) semantic/pragmatic relations, and they provide directions towards how an IQA system should tackle context fusion to improve answering of Follow-Up Questions.