Learning to Answer Questions from Wikipedia Infoboxes

Alvaro Morales, Varot Premtoon, Cordelia Avery, Sue Felshin, Boris Katz
CSAIL MIT


Abstract

A natural language interface to answers on the Web can help us access information more efficiently. We start with an interesting source of information—infoboxes in Wikipedia that summarize factoid knowledge—and develop a comprehensive approach to answering questions with high precision. We first build a system to access data in infoboxes in a structured manner. We use our system to construct a crowdsourced dataset of over 15,000 high-quality, diverse questions. With these questions, we train a convolutional neural network model that outperforms models that achieve top results in similar answer selection tasks.