Answer Selection and Confidence Estimation

New Directions in Question Answering

Volume

Papers from the 2003 AAAI Spring Symposium

Contents

We describe BBN’s Question Answering work at TREC 2002. We focus on two issues: answer selection and confidence estimation. We found that some simple constraints on the candidate answers can improve a pure IRbased technique for answer selection. We also found that a few simple features derived from the question-answer pairs can be used for effective confidence estimation. Our results also confirmed earlier findings that the World-Wide Web is a very useful resource for answering TREC-style factoid questions.