Sean Jones
Assistant Professor
- Milwaukee WI UNITED STATES
- Diercks Hall DH434
- Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Sean Jones is an instructor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at MSOE.
Education, Licensure and Certification
M.S.
Computer Science
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
2015
B.S.
Computer Science
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
2013
A.A.S.
Information Technology-Networking Specialist
MATC-Milwaukee
2007
Biography
Areas of Expertise
Social
Selected Publications
Towards Automated Classification of Consumers' Cancer-Related Questions with a New Taxonomy of Expected Answer Types
Health Informatics JournalMcRoy, S., Jones, S., Kurmally, A.
2015-03-10
DOI:10.1177/1460458215571643
This article examines methods for automated question classification applied to cancer-related questions that people have asked on the web. This work is part of a broader effort to provide automated question answering for health education. We created a new corpus of consumer-health questions related to cancer and a new taxonomy for those questions. We then compared the effectiveness of different statistical methods for developing classifiers, including weighted classification and resampling. Basic methods for building classifiers were limited by the high variability in the natural distribution of questions and typical refinement approaches of feature selection and merging categories achieved only small improvements to classifier accuracy. Best performance was achieved using weighted classification and resampling methods, the latter yielding an accuracy of F1 = 0.963. Thus, it would appear that statistical classifiers can be trained on natural data, but only if natural distributions of classes are smoothed. Such classifiers would be useful for automated question answering, for enriching web-based content, or assisting clinical professionals to answer questions.
