Interactive Incremental Question Answering

We present a machine learning system that plays a trivia game called "quiz bowl", in which questions are incrementally revealed to players. This task requires players (both human and computer) to decide not only what answer to guess but also when to interrupt the moderator ("buzz in") with that guess. Our system uses a recently-introduced deep learning model called the deep averaging network (or DAN) to generate a set of candidate guesses given a partially-revealed question. For each candidate guess, features are generated from language models and fed to a classifier that decides whether to buzz in with that guess. Previous demonstrations have shown that our system can compete with skilled human players.