An expectation-driven approach to Q-A processing in a mixed-initiative natural language interface

In a mixed-initiative natural-language interface, questions are essentially requests for information. Expectations about the nature of the information requested accompany such questions. The system needs a way of determining whether the user has adequately answered its question. An expectation-based approach to this aspect of question-answer understanding is shown to be a viable strategy. The authors discuss representing and extracting these expectations from system questions and then subsequently using them to evaluate user answers to these questions