June 27, 2002

Omnibase: Uniform Access to Heterogeneous Data for Question Answering

Boris Katz, Sue Felshin, Deniz Yuret, Ali Ibrahim, Jimmy J. Lin, Gregory Marton, Alton Jerome McFarland, Baris Temelkuran. In Birger Andersson, Maria Bergholtz, Paul Johannesson (Eds.): Natural Language Processing and Information Systems, 6th International Conference on Applications of Natural Language to Information Systems, NLDB 2002, Stockholm, Sweden, June 27-28, 2002, Revised Papers. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 2553 Springer 2002, ISBN 3-540-00307-X.

Abstract: Although the World Wide Web contains a tremendous amount of information, the lack of uniform structure makes finding the right knowledge difficult. A solution is to turn the Web into a virtual database and to access it through natural language. We built Omnibase, a system that integrates heterogeneous data sources using an object-property-value model. With the help of Omnibase, our Start natural language system can now access numerous heterogeneous data sources on the Web in a uniform manner, and answers millions of user questions with high precision.

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    March 01, 2002

    Alpha-beta-conspiracy search

    David McAllester and Deniz Yuret. ICGA Journal Vol. 25, No. 1 - March 2002 (PDF)

    Abstract: We introduce a variant of α-β search in which each node is associated with two depths rather than one. The purpose of α-β search is to find strategies for each player that together establish a value for the root position. A max strategy establishes a lower bound and the min strategy establishes an upper bound. It has long been observed that forced moves should be searched more deeply. Here we make the observation that in the max strategy we are only concerned with the forcedness of max moves and in the min strategy we are only concerned with the forcedness of min moves. This leads to two measures of depth --- one for each strategy --- and to a two-depth variant of α-β called ABC search. The two-depth approach can be formally derived from conspiracy theory and the structure of the ABC procedure is justified by two theorems relating ABC search and conspiracy numbers.

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