Designing an automated FAQ answering system for farmers based on hybrid strategies

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to develop an automated frequently asked question(FAQ) answering system for farmers. This paper presents an approach for calculating the similarity between Chinese sentences based on hybrid strategies.Design/methodology/approach: We analyzed the factors influencing the successful matching between a user's question and a question-answer(QA) pair in the FAQ database. Our approach is based on a combination of multiple factors. Experiments were conducted to test the performance of our method.Findings: Experiments show that this proposed method has higher accuracy. Compared with similarity calculation based on TF-IDF,the sentence surface forms and the semantic relations,the proposed method based on hybrid strategies has a superior performance in precision,recall and F-measure value.Research limitations: The FAQ answering system is only capable of meeting users' demand for text retrieval at present. In the future,the system needs to be improved to meet users' demand for retrieving images and videos.Practical implications: This FAQ answering system will help farmers utilize agricultural information resources more efficiently.Originality/value: We design the algorithms for calculating similarity of Chinese sentences based on hybrid strategies,which integrate the question surface similarity,the question semantic similarity and the question-answer similarity based on latent semantic analysis(LSA) to find answers to a user's question.

Identification and Analysis on True or False Hybrids from Hybridization Populations of Litchi( Litchi chinensis Sonn.) Using EST-SSR Markers

In order to better distinguish true hybrids in litchi crossbreeding,F1generations of two litchi hybridized combinations namely that‘Xuehuaizi’בGuiwei’and‘Xuehuaizi’בJiaohesanyuehong’were used as materials to identify true hybrids,to construct mapping populations and to study the genetic diversities of the two populations with EST-SSR markers.The results showed that F1generations of the two hybrid populations could be identified with an identification rate of100%by the combination of four pair primers,respectively,and the 159 individual plants of the two populations were true hybrids.In addition,variations were exited in leaf morphology of the progenies of the two populations and bands of parents absented were occurred on genotype.The clustering analysis showed that 113 F1plants from the hybridized combination of‘Xuehuaizi’בGuiwei’were clustered into six categories（similarity coefficient was 0.68）,and 63.72%（72 plants）of which clustered into one group with male parent.The genetic distances between 32 plants（28.3%）and their parents were far which indicated that larger variation or recombinant appeared in these plants.Forty six hybrid progenies of the combination of‘Xuehuaizi’בJiaohesanyuehong’were divided into two categories when the similarity coefficient was 0.642 and most individual plants（60.87%）showed closer genetic relationship with female parent and partial maternal genetic tendency.It is concluded that EST-SSR markers are suitable to identify true hybrids of litchi.The construction of the two F1mapping populations has established basis for further genetic linkage mapping,meanwhile,has accumulated materials for cultivar improvement of litchi.