Analysis of affirmative/negative intentions of the answers to yes-no questions and its application to a web-based interface

Abstract

A computer system asks elderly people questions about their health and quality of life and usually allows them the alternatives of yes or no as their answers. A human doctor, on the other hand, has some conversations with their patients and often receives more ambiguous answers than a straightforward yes/no. This paper proposes a method to extract affirmative/negative degrees of the answers to yes-no questions in order to judge speakers' intentions from their utterances. We paid special attention to adverbs, interjections, direct/indirect representation predicates and defined their affirmative values based on the result of question-naire. We also defined a formula to calculate affirmative value change caused by different verb aspects. As a result, our proposed method can determine an overall affirmative/negative intention to a given question by analyzing users' utterances. Finally, in order to verify the validity of our method, we present the result of its application to our web-based analytical system interface for elderly people.