Answering Comparative Questions with Arguments

Question answering platforms such as Yahoo! Answers or Quora always contained questions that ask other humans for help when comparing two or more options. Since nowadays more and more people also “talk” to their devices, such comparative questions are also part of the query stream that major search engines receive. Interestingly, major search engines answer some comparative questions pretty well while for others, they just show the “standard” ten blue links. But a good response to a comparative question might be very different from these ten blue links—for example, a direct answer could show an aggregation of the pros and cons of the different options. This observation motivated our DFG-funded project “ACQuA: Answering Comparative Questions with Arguments” for which we describe the achieved results so far, and ongoing activities like the first shared task on argument retrieval.