Question Answering for the Curated Web

Preface.- Acknowledgments.- Introduction.- Setup.- Getting Started with Simple Questions.- Complex Question Answering.- Conversational Question Answering.- Part I: Summary and Insights.- Setup.- Reading Comprehension.- Open-Domain Question Answering.- Multi-Hop Question Answering.- Conversational Question Answering.- Part II: Summary and Insights.- Open Directions.- References.- Authors' Biographies.

Rishiraj Saha Roy is a Senior Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics (MPII), Saarbruecken, Germany. He leads the research group on Question Answering (https://qa.mpi-inf.mpg.de), which focuses on robust and interpretable solutions for answering natural language questions over structured and unstructured data. He has about six years of research experience on question answering. In recent years, he has served on the PCs of conferences like SIGIR, CIKM, WSDM, AAAI, and EMNLP, and published at venues like SIGIR, CIKM, WSDM, WWW, and NAACL. Prior to joining MPII, he worked for one and a half years as a Computer Scientist at Adobe Research. He completed his Ph.D. as a Microsoft Research India Fellow from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur. More information about his research can be found at http://people.mpi-inf.mpg.de/~rsaharo/.Avishek Anand is an Assistant Professor at the Leibniz University of Hannover, Germany, and a member of the L3S Research Center, Hannover. He has also been a visiting scholar at Amazon Search. His research aims to develop intelligent and transparent machine learning approaches to help humans find relevant information. Specifically, he is interested in scalable and interpretable representation learning methods for text and graphs for problems relating to the Web and information retrieval. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Max Planck Institute for Informatics (MPII), Saarbruecken, Germany. He has served in the PCs of numerous Web, IR, and NLP conferences and journals, like WSDM, SIGIR, ACL, TOIS, TKDE, and TWEB. He has served on the organizing committees of conferences like ICTIR, TPDL, Dagstuhl seminars, and other summer schools. His research is supported by generous grants from the German Science Foundation (DFG), EU Horizon 2020, Amazon research awards, and Schufa Holding AG. More information about his research can be found at https://www.avishekanand.com.