A Linguistic Analysis of Question Taxonomies. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 56(7), 715-728.

Pomerantz, Jeffrey (2005) A Linguistic Analysis of Question Taxonomies. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 56(7), 715-728..

This is the latest version of this eprint.

Full text available as:
PDF - Requires Adobe Acrobat Reader or other PDF viewer.

Abstract

Recent work in automatic question answering has called for question taxonomies as a critical component of the process of machine understanding of questions. There is a long tradition of classifying questions in library reference services, and digital reference services have a strong need for automation to support scalability. Digital reference and question answering systems have the potential to arrive at a highly fruitful symbiosis. To move towards this goal, an extensive review was conducted of bodies of literature from several fields that deal with questions, to identify question taxonomies that exist in these bodies of literature. In the course of this review, five question taxonomies were identified, at four levels of linguistic analysis.

EPrint Type:	Preprint
Keywords:	question answering, question taxonomies, question classification, digital reference, linguistic analysis
Subjects:	Classification Linguistics
ID Code:	1206
Deposited On:	29 June 2006
Alternative Locations:	http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/asi.20162, http://ils.unc.edu/~jpom/pubs/Preprint-JASIST-2005a.pdf
Eprint Statistics:	View statistics for this eprint
Tell A Colleague:	Tell a colleague about it.

Austin, J. L. (1999). How to Do Things with Words (Second ed.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Bar-Hillel, Y. (1971). Out of the pragmatic wastebasket. Linguistic Inquiry, 2, 401-407.

Belkin, N. J., Oddy, R. N., & Brooks, H. M. (1982). ASK for Information Retrieval: Part I. Background and Theory. Journal of Documentation, 38(2), 61-71.

Belnap, N. D., Jr., & Steel, T. B., Jr. (1976). The Logic of Questions and Answers. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Bopp, R. E., & Smith, L. C. (2001). Reference and Information Services: An Introduction. Englewood, CO: Libraries Unlimited, Inc.

Brown, D. M. (1985). Telephone Reference Questions: A Characterization by Subject, Answer Format, and Level of Complexity. RQ, 24(3), 290-303.

Bunge, C. A. (1990). Factors Related to Output Measures for Reference Services in Public Libraries: Data from Thirty-six Libraries. Public Libraries, 29, 42-47.

Burger, J., Cardie, C., Chaudhri, V., Gaizauskas, R., Harabagiu, S., Israel, D., et al. (2001). Issues, Tasks and Program Structures to Roadmap Research in Question & Answering (Q&A): National Institute of Standards and Technology. http://www-nlpir.nist.gov/projects/duc/papers/qa.Roadmap-paper_v2.doc.

Carnap, R. (1957). Meaning and Necessity. University of Chicago Press: Chicago.

Carter, D. S., & Janes, J. (2000). Unobtrusive Data Analysis of Digital Reference Questions and Service at the Internet Public Library: An Exploratory Study. Library Trends, 49(2), 251-265.

Chen, J., Diekema, A. R., Taffet, M. D., McCracken, N., Ercan, N., Ozgencil, O. Y., et al. (2001, November 13-16). Question Answering: CNLP at the TREC-10 Question Answering Track. Paper presented at the Tenth Text REtrieval Conference (TREC 10), Gaithersburg, MD. http://trec.nist.gov/pubs/trec10/papers/cnlptrec10.pdf.

Childers, T., Lopata, C., & Stafford, B. (1991). Measuring the Difficulty of Reference Questions. RQ, 31(2), 237-243

Chomsky, N. (1957). Syntactic Structures. Mouton: The Hague.

Chomsky, N. (1977). On WH-movement. In P. Culicover, T. Wasow, and A. Akmajian (Eds.), Formal syntax (pp. 71–132). New York: Academic Press.

Clark, H. H., & Wilkes-Gibbs, D. (1986). Referring as a Collaborative Process. Cognition, 22(1), 1-39.

Cohen, P., Schrag, R., Jones, E., Pease, A., Lin, A., Starr, B., Gunning, D., & Burke, M. (1998). The DARPA High-Performance Knowledge Bases Project. AI Magazine, 19(4), 25-49.

Conner, M. (1927). What a Reference Librarian Should Know. The Library Journal, 52(8), 415-418.

Crews, K. D. (1988). The Accuracy of Reference Service: Variables for Research and Implementation. Library & Information Science Research, 10(3), 331-355.

Dervin, B. (1977). Useful Theory of Librarianship: Communication, Not Information. Drexel Library Quarterly, 13(3), 16-32.

Dervin, B. (1983, May). An Overview of Sense-Making Research: Concepts, Methods, and Results to Date. Paper presented at the International Communication Association Annual Meeting, Dallas, Texas.

Dervin, B., & Dewdney, P. (1986). Neutral Questioning: A New Approach to the Reference Interview. RQ, 25(4), 506-513.

Dewdney, P., & Michell, G. (1996). Oranges and Peaches: Understanding Communication Accidents in the Reference Interview. Reference & User Services Quarterly, 35(4), 520-534. http://www.ala.org/Content/NavigationMenu/RUSA/Publications2/Reference_and_User_Services_Quarterly/Special_Features/RSP_Award-Winning_Articles/19981/1998.htm.

Diekema, A., Liu, X., Chen, J., Wang, H., McCracken, N., Yilmazel, O., et al. (2000, 13-16 November 2000). Question Answering: CNLP at the TREC-9 Question Answering Track. Paper presented at the Ninth Text REtrieval Conference (TREC-9), Gaithersburg, MD. http://trec.nist.gov/pubs/trec9/papers/cnlptrec9.pdf.

Diekema, A. R., Chen, J., McCracken, N., Ozgencil, N. E., Taffet, M. D., Yilmazel, O., et al. (2002, November 13-16). Question Answering: CNLP at the TREC-2002 Question Answering Track. Paper presented at the Tenth Text REtrieval Conference (TREC 11), Gaithersburg, MD. http://trec.nist.gov/pubs/trec11/papers/syracuse.diekema.pdf.

Diekema, A., Yilmazel, O., Chen, J., Harwell, S., He, L., & Liddy, E. D. (2003). What do You Mean? Finding Answers to Complex Questions. In Proceedings of the AAAI Spring Symposium: New Directions in Question Answering. Palo Alto, California. http://www.cnlp.org/publications/AAAI2003.pdf.

Eichman, T. L. (1978). The Complex Nature of Opening Reference Questions. RQ, 17(3), 212-222.

Evans, G. (1985). The Causal Theory of Names. In Martinich, A. P. (Ed.), The Philosophy of Language (Fourth ed., pp. 296-307). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Fogarty, E. (1995). Reference Questions: Who, What, Where, When, How, and Why? New Jersey Libraries, 28, 19-21.

Graesser, A. C., & Black, J. B. (Eds.). (1985). The Psychology of Questions. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

Graesser, A. C., Lang, K., & Horgan, D. (1988). A Taxonomy for Question Generation. Questioning Exchange, 2(1), 3-15.

Graesser, A. C., Person, N., & Huber, J. (1992). Mechanisms That Generate Questions. In T. W. Lauer, E. Peacock & A. C. Graesser (Eds.), Questions and Information Systems (pp. 167-187). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

Graesser, A. C., McMahen, C. L., & Johnson, B. K. (1994). Question Asking and Answering. In M. A. Gernsbacher (Ed.), Handbook of Psycholinguistics (pp. 517-538). San Diego: Academic Press.

Hermjakob, U. (2001, 6 July). Parsing and Question Classification for Question Answering. Paper presented at the Association for Computational Linguistics 39th Annual Meeting and 10th Conference of the European Chapter Proceedings of the Workshop on Open-Domain Question Answering, Seattle, WA. http://www.isi.edu/~ulf/papers/acl01-qa-parsing.pdf.

Herner, S., Vellucci, M. J., & Leyman, E. (1972). National Inventory of Library Statistics Practices. Volume I: Data Collection on the National, State, and Local Levels. Washington D.C.: U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Office of Education.

Hovy, E., Hermjakob, U., & Lin, C.-Y. (2001, November 13-16). The Use of External Knowledge in Factoid QA. Paper presented at the Tenth Text REtrieval Conference (TREC 10), Gaithersburg, MD. http://trec.nist.gov/pubs/trec10/papers/TREC10-webclopedia.pdf.

Kaske, N. K., & Aluri, R. (1980). Analysis of Reference Statistics Reported in 1977 Library General Information Survey. New York, NY.

Katz, W. A. (1997a). Introduction to Reference Work: Basic Information Services (Vol. 1). New York: McGraw-Hill.

Katz, W. A. (1997b). Introduction to Reference Work: Reference Services and Reference Processes (Vol. 2). New York: McGraw-Hill.

Keyes, J. G. (1996). Using Conceptual Categories of Questions to Measure Differences in Retrieval Performance. Paper presented at the ASIS 1996 Annual Meeting: Global Complexity: Information, Chaos and Control, Baltimore, MD. http://www.asis.org/annual-96/ElectronicProceedings/keyes.html.

King, G. B. (1982). Try It - You'll Like It: A Comprehensive Management Information System for Reference Service. The Reference Librarian, 3, 71-78.

Kripke, S. (1980). Naming and Necessity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Kwok, K. L., Grunfeld, L., Dinstl, N., & Chan, M. (2001, November 13-16). TREC2001 Question-Answer, Web and Cross Language Experiments using PIRCS (DRAFT). Paper presented at the Tenth Text REtrieval Conference (TREC 10), Gaithersburg, MD. http://trec.nist.gov/pubs/trec10/papers/queenst2001.pdf.

Lehnert, W. G. (1978). The Process of Question Answering: A Computer Simulation of Cognition. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

Library of Congress. (1992). Library of Congress Subject Headings (15th ed.). Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress Catalog Distribution Service.

Liddy, E. D. (1998). Enhanced Text Retrieval Using Natural Language Processing. Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 24(4), 14-16. http://www.asis.org/Bulletin/Apr-98/liddy.html.

Lynch, M. J. (1978). Reference Interviews in Public Libraries. The Library Quarterly, 48(2), 119-142.

McClure, C. R., Lankes, R. D., Gross, M., & Choltco-Devlin, B. (2002). Statistics, Measures and Quality Standards for Assessing Digital Reference Library Services: Guidelines and Procedures. Syracuse, NY: Information Institute of Syracuse.

Mitchell, J. S., Beall, J., Matthews, W. E. Jr., New, G. R. (1996). Dewey Decimal Classification and Relative Index (21st ed.). Albany, NY: Forest Press.

Miyake, N., & Norman, D. A. (1979). To Ask a Question, One Must Know Enough to Know What is Not Known. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 18(3), 357-364.

Moldovan, D., Harabagiu, S., Pasca, M., Mihalcea, R., Goodrum, R., Gîrju, R., et al. (1999, November 16-19). LASSO: A Tool for Surfing the Answer Net. Paper presented at the Eighth Text REtrieval Conference (TREC 8), Gaithersburg, MD. http://trec.nist.gov/pubs/trec8/papers/smu.pdf.

Mooney, M. T. (1991). Sears List of Subject Headings (14th ed.). New York: H. W. Wilson Company.

Murfin, M. E., & Gugelchuk, G. M. (1987). Development and Testing of a Reference Transaction Assessment Instrument. College & Research Libraries, 48(4), 314-338.

Orlikowski, W, & Yates, J. (1994). Genre Repertoire: The Structuring of Communicative Practice in Organizations. Administrative Science Quarterly, 39(4), 547-574.

Phenix, K. (1983). Analysis of the 1981/82 HEGIS/LIBGIS Responses of Illinois Academic Libraries (No. Illinois Library Statistical Report 9).

Prior, M., & Prior, A. (1955). Erotetic Logic. The Philosophical Review, 64(1), 43-59.

Ranganathan, S. R. (1957). Prolegomena to Library Classification. London: The Library Association.

Ranganathan, S. R. (1965). The Colon Classification (Vol. IV). New Brunswick, N.J.: Graduate School of Library Service, Rutgers University.

Richardson Jr., J. V. (1995). Knowledge-Based Systems for General Reference Work: Applications, Problems, and Progress. San Diego: Academic Press.

Roberts, G. L., & Bavelas, J. B. (1996). The Communicative Dictionary: A Collaborative Theory of Meaning. In J. Stewart (Ed.), Beyond the Symbol Model: Reflections on the Representational Nature of Language (pp. 135-160). New York: State University of New York Press.

Robinson, W. P., & Rackstraw, S. J. (1972a). A Question of Answers (Vol. I). Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Robinson, W. P., & Rackstraw, S. J. (1972b). A Question of Answers (Vol. II). Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Rothstein, S. (1964). The Measurement and Evaluation of Reference Service. Library Trends, 12(3), 456-472.

Ryle, G. (1949). Meaning and Necessity. Philosophy, 24, 69-76.

Sachs, H., Schegloff, E. A., & Jefferson, G. (1974). A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation. Language, 50, 696-734.

Schegloff, E. A., & Sachs, H. (1973). Opening up closings. Semiotica, 8, 289-327.

Searle, J. R. (1995). Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Seng, M. (1978). Reference Service Upgraded Using Patrons' Reference Questions. Special Libraries, 69(1), 21-28.

Slavens, T. P. (Ed.). (1985). Reference Interviews, Questions, and Materials (Second ed.). Metuchen, N.J.: The Scarecrow Press, Inc.

Smith, C. A. (2002). The Clinical Document Architecture: XML for Enhanced Clinical Information Retrieval. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Pittsburgh.

Stalker, J. C., & Murfin, M. E. (1996). Why Reference Librarians Won't Disappear: A Study of Success in Identifying Answering Sources for Reference Questions. RQ, 35(4), 489-503.

Stavri, P. Z. (1996). Medical Problem Attributes and Information-Seeking Questions. Bulletin of the Medical Library Association, 84(3), 367-374.

Taylor, R. S. (1968). Question-Negotiation and Information Seeking in Libraries. College & Research Libraries, 29, 178-194.

U.S. Department of Education Office of Educational Research and Improvement. (1981). LIBGIS - Public Library Universe (1981). Washington D.C.: U.S. Department of Education, Office of Educational Research and Improvement.

Vickery, B. C. (1966). Faceted Classification Schemes (Vol. V). New Brunswick, NJ: Graduate School of Library Service, Rutgers University.

Voorhees, E. M. (1999, November 16-19). The TREC-8 Question Answering Track Report. Paper presented at the Eighth Text REtrieval Conference (TREC 8), Gaithersburg, MD. http://trec.nist.gov/pubs/trec8/papers/qa_report.pdf.

Voorhees, E. M. (2000, November 13-16). Overview of the TREC-9 Question Answering Track. Paper presented at the Ninth Text REtrieval Conference (TREC 9), Gaithersburg, MD. http://trec.nist.gov/pubs/trec9/papers/qa_overview.pdf.

Voorhees, E. M. (2001, November 13-16). Overview of the TREC 2001 Question Answering Track. Paper presented at the Tenth Text REtrieval Conference (TREC 10), Gaithersburg, MD. http://trec.nist.gov/pubs/trec10/papers/qa10.pdf.

Voorhees, E. (2002, November 19-22). Overview of the TREC 2002 Question Answering Track. Paper presented at the Eleventh Text REtrieval Conference (TREC 11), Gaithersburg, MD. http://trec.nist.gov/pubs/trec11/papers/QA11.pdf.

White, H. D. (1981). Measurement at the Reference Desk. Drexel Library Quarterly, 17(1), 3-35.

White, M. D. (1989). Different Approaches to the Reference Interview. The Reference Librarian, 25/26, 631-646.

White, M. D. (1998). Questions in Reference Interviews. Journal of Documentation, 54(4), 443-465.

White, M. D. (2001). Digital Reference Services: Framework for Analysis and Evaluation. Library & Information Science Research, 23(3), 211-231.

White, M. D., & Iivonen, M. (2002). Assessing the Level of Difficulty in Web Search Questions. Library Quarterly, 72(2), 205-233.

Available Versions of this Item

A Linguistic Analysis of Question Taxonomies. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 56(7), 715-728. (deposited 29 June 2006) [Currently Displayed]