Processing Definition Questions in an Open-Domain Question Answering System

Mining Answers from Texts and Knowledge Bases

Volume

Papers from the 2002 AAAI Spring Symposium

Contents

This paper presents a hybrid method for finding answers to Definition questions within large text collections. Because candidate answers to Definition questions do not generally fall in clearly defined semantic categories, answer discovery is guided by a combination of pattern matching and WordNet-based question expansion. The method is incorporated in a large open-domain question answering system and validated by extracting answers to 188 questions from a standard 3-Gigabyte text collection and from Web documents.