Let Me Answer That For You

Let Me Answer That For You is a limited domain question answering system that was developed for CS6320 Natural Language Processing - spring 2019 by Prof. Mithun Balakrishna.

The problem statement was to implement a Question Answering (QA) system using NLP features and techniques for the following Question Types:

1. WHO questions

• Who founded Apple Inc.?
• Who supported Apple in creating a new computing platform?

2. WHEN questions:

• When was Apple Inc. founded?
• When did Apple go public?

3. WHERE questions:

• Where is Apple’s headquarters?
• Where did Apple open its first retail store?

The system would need parsed web articles in a text format.

Expected Input: Natural language question

Expected Output:

• Exact answer phrase(s)
• Supporting sentence(s) in Wikipedia document
• Supporting Wikipedia document name(s)

More details in the project-description.pdf file.

Contributors:

_{Manindra Anantaneni}

Technologies

• Python 3.7
• Stanford CoreNLP 3.9.2
• Elastricsearch 6.6.0

Setup

Stanford Core NLP is expected to run at localhost:9000 Elastricsearch is expected to run at localhost:9020

pip install requests nltk CoreNLPParser CoreNLPDependencyParser PorterStemmer Elasticsearch

Usage

1. Run nlp-pipeline.py in commandline to parse the files - they are expected to be in the same directory in a folder Wikipedia articles. The parsed files are saved into a pipeline folder.
2. Run elastic-insert.py to dump json parses from step 1 and index them to elastic search.
3. Run query-seach.py - expects a file name (questions seperated by lines in a single file) Example: questions.txt, ouput is generated in a output.txt file formatted as a json structure.

Sample I/O:

{
    "Question": "Who founded Apple Inc.?",
    "answers": {
        "1": "Jobs , Wozniak and Ronald Wayne Computer Inc.",
        "2": "NeXT , Jobs Inc.",
		...
		...
    },
    "documents": {
        "1": "SteveJobs.txt",
        "2": "SteveJobs.txt",
		...
		...
    },
    "sentences": {
        "1": "Jobs, Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne founded Apple Computer (now called Apple Inc.) in the garage of Jobs's Los Altos home on Crist Drive.",
        "2": "1985–1997\nNeXT computer\nFollowing his resignation from Apple in 1985, Jobs founded NeXT Inc. with $7 million.",
		...
		...
    }
}