Abstract

Services for citizens provided by the government are often complex and related with various requirements. Citizens usually have a lot of questions traditionally answered by human experts. In this paper, we describe an information retrieval-based question answering (QA) system for the e-government domain. The QA system is capable of giving direct answers to questions in German concerning governmental services. The system successfully handles ambiguous questions by combining retrieval methods, task trees and a rule-based approach. We evaluate our approach in a scenario tailored to the needs of the administration of a big German city. The preliminary results show that our system provides high-quality answers for the most questions.

@inproceedings{SchwarzerEtAl:AnInteractiveEGovernmentQuestionAnsweringSystem,
author = {Malte Schwarzer and Jonas D"{u}ver and Danuta Ploch and Andreas Lommatzsch},
title = {An Interactive e-Government Question Answering System},
booktitle = {Proc. of the LWDA conference, Track Information Retrieval},
year = {2016},
series = {LWDA '16},
pages = {74--82},
location = {Potsdam, Germany},
publisher = {CEUR Workshop Proceedings},
url = {http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1670/paper-26.pdf},
}