This paper presents a case study of edutainment robot, which is an intelligent robot for educational use with a voice-QA model applied. The emphatic functions of our robot are: analyzing spoken question from a student, finding an appropriate answer in Korean encyclopedia, and then serving the answer with speech synthesis. We develop the ESTk, which is an Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) system based on Finite State Network (FSN) for processing Korean spoken questions. For answer extraction, we utilize machine learning techniques and pattern extraction method. With our live-update interaction method, our robot can be extended with new knowledge in real-time. By conducting a quiz game, we show a possibility of our robot as an edutainment robot.

We propose a semantic passage segmentation method for a Question Answering (QA) system. We define a semantic passage as sentences grouped by semantic coherence, determined by the topic assigned to individual sentences. Topic assignments are done by a sentence classifier based on a statistical classification technique, Maximum Entropy (ME), combined with multiple linguistic features. We ran experiments to evaluate the proposed method and its impact on application tasks, passage retrieval and template-filling for question answering. The experimental result shows that our semantic passage retrieval method using topic matching is more useful than fixed length passage retrieval. With the template-filling task used for information extraction in the QA system, the value of the sentence topic assignment method was reinforced.

As WWW grows at an increasing speed, a classifier targeted at hypertext has become in high demand. While document categorization is quite a mature, the issue of utilizing hypertext structure and hyperlinks has been relatively unexplored. In this paper, we propose a practical method for enhancing both the speed and the quality of hypertext categorization using hyperlinks. In comparison against a recently proposed technique that appears to be the only one of the kind, we obtained up to 18.5% of improvement in effectiveness while reducing the processing time dramatically. We attempt to explain through experiments what factors contribute to the improvement.