{"id":870,"date":"2018-03-25T08:14:20","date_gmt":"2018-03-25T08:14:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rangakrish.com\/?p=870"},"modified":"2018-03-26T04:31:16","modified_gmt":"2018-03-26T04:31:16","slug":"question-answering-in-mathematica","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rangakrish.com\/index.php\/2018\/03\/25\/question-answering-in-mathematica\/","title":{"rendered":"Question Answering in Mathematica"},"content":{"rendered":"

About 10 days ago, I received an update for Mathematica<\/strong><\/em>. The latest version is 11.3.0. As usual, I looked through the list of new features<\/a>\u00a0in this release. There are several new features, but one of them attracted my attention immediately: There is a new function FindTextualAnswer<\/i><\/b><\/a>\u00a0that, given a piece of text and a question, can identify the part of the text that answers the question.<\/p>\n

I explored this function briefly and would like to share my findings in this post. First, I must point out that the documentation says this function is Experimental<\/strong><\/em>, implying that there could be changes in future releases.<\/p>\n

Let us start with a simple example:<\/p>\n

\"Example<\/a>
Example 1<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The function takes at least 2 arguments. The first is a piece of text and the second is a question (we can include multiple questions as a list) based on the text. The function returns a text fragment from the first argument, which supposedly answers the question.<\/p>\n

In the above example, When asked the question “Who is Vicky?”<\/em>, the function correctly says “my pet dog”<\/em>. Nice.<\/p>\n

Note that there is no paraphrasing involved here; the answer is taken directly from the given text. Even that is a non-trivial task.<\/p>\n

Let us try two more examples:<\/p>\n

\"Some<\/a>
Some More Examples<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Again, fairly interesting. The function seems capable of providing direct<\/em> answers to questions based on the text.<\/p>\n

We can ask for possible multiple answers along with their probability.<\/p>\n

\"Answers<\/a>
Answers with Probability<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In this example, I asked for two possible answers. The result contains each answer along with the respective probability.<\/p>\n

Let us see if the function can handle tricky questions.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>
A Tricky Example<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Gotcha! Since there is no mention of Mary<\/strong><\/em> anywhere in the text, I was expecting something like Don\u2019t know<\/strong><\/em>, but the function\u2019s response really stumped me! How did it map Mary<\/strong><\/em> to Vicky<\/strong><\/em>?<\/p>\n

Let us try one more:<\/p>\n

\"Another<\/a>
Another Tricky Question<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This is even more weird. There is no mention of John<\/strong><\/em>, or anyone being happy<\/strong><\/em> in the given text, but the function seems to make incorrect inferences.<\/p>\n

The documentation says that the function uses statistical methods to find answers. There is also a mention somewhere that it can understand semantics concepts to an extent, but that it cannot apply logic.<\/p>\n

Well, I think this is a good beginning, but there is significant scope for improving the functionality.<\/p>\n

Hope future releases take care of that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

About 10 days ago, I received an update for Mathematica. The latest version is 11.3.0. As usual, I looked through the list of new features\u00a0in this release. There are several new features, but one of them attracted my attention immediately: There is a new function FindTextualAnswer\u00a0that, given a piece of text and a question, can […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[72,107,17],"tags":[43,138],"class_list":["post-870","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mathematica","category-natural-language-processing","category-programming","tag-mathematica","tag-question-answering"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9OLnF-e2","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1541,"url":"https:\/\/www.rangakrish.com\/index.php\/2019\/04\/21\/textcontents-function-in-mathematica-12\/","url_meta":{"origin":870,"position":0},"title":"TextContents[ ] Function in Mathematica 12","author":"admin","date":"April 21, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"Mathematica 12 was released a few days ago.\u00a0 It has been over a year since version 11.3 came out in March 2018. The long wait appears justified since the new release boasts of numerous improvements and new features across several areas. You may want to read this blog post\u00a0by Stephen\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Mathematica"","block_context":{"text":"Mathematica","link":"https:\/\/www.rangakrish.com\/index.php\/category\/mathematica\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"Importing Text File","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.rangakrish.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/FileImport.png?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.rangakrish.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/FileImport.png?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.rangakrish.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/FileImport.png?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x"},"classes":[]},{"id":348,"url":"https:\/\/www.rangakrish.com\/index.php\/2016\/09\/26\/computer-vision-with-mathematica\/","url_meta":{"origin":870,"position":1},"title":"Computer Vision with Mathematica","author":"admin","date":"September 26, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"Over the past several weeks, I have been discussing many interesting features of Mathematica. 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Let us start with words. What if we wish to know\u00a0the various definitions of the word image?\u00a0Here is the answer. Mathematica gives the various senses\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Mathematica"","block_context":{"text":"Mathematica","link":"https:\/\/www.rangakrish.com\/index.php\/category\/mathematica\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"Word Definition","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.rangakrish.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/09\/word-data1-1024x238.png?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.rangakrish.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/09\/word-data1-1024x238.png?resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.rangakrish.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/09\/word-data1-1024x238.png?resize=525%2C300 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.rangakrish.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/09\/word-data1-1024x238.png?resize=700%2C400 2x"},"classes":[]},{"id":3514,"url":"https:\/\/www.rangakrish.com\/index.php\/2024\/10\/02\/using-openai-from-mathematica-part-2\/","url_meta":{"origin":870,"position":3},"title":"Using OpenAI from Mathematica: Part-2","author":"admin","date":"October 2, 2024","format":false,"excerpt":"I had written an earlier article\u00a0showing how to use OpenAI models from Mathematica ver 14.0.\u00a0 Wolfram Mathematica ver 14.1 was released recently, with several improvements in the area of LLMs. Of course, there are many other core additions as well, but our focus is on LLMs in this article. 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The focus was on working with the exchanges supported by Mathematica, for example BSE India. What if we have stock data from a different source and want to analyze it in Mathematica? 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