SSGRR 2002
TOPIC AREA: Question Answering, Mathematical Linguistics, Quantitative/Qualitative Linguistics, Language Understanding
ABSTRACT
Design, development, experimentation and evaluation of a hybrid Question Answering system comprising of a statistical Information Retrieval System and various linguistic components is the center of our current research. The QASTIIR (Question Answering System Through Intelligent Information Retrieval) project addresses the question of where and when the techniques of computational linguistics could best be used to improve performance of a hybrid statistical / linguistic question answering system. Query processing is done from both angles (statistical -- extracting its key terms) and linguistic (parsing it into a semantic representation). After statistical retrieval of document, paragraph and sentence “candidates”, they are parsed into their semantic representations, and then matched against the query. The closeness to the query’s semantics subsequently determines the best answer. Our system, modular, portable and integrated, shows promising results and facilitates integration experimentation.