Extending Answers using Discourse Structure

Research on Question Answering is focused mainly on classifying the question type and finding the answer, while presenting the answer in a way that suits the user’s needs has received little attention. This paper shows how existing question answering systems can be improved by exploiting Rhetorical Structure Theory-based summarization techniques in order to extract more than just the exact answer from the document in which the answer resides. The output is an extensive answer, which also provides additional information related to the question, and which may give the user an opportunity to assess the accuracy of the answer (is this what I am looking for?). A first experiment confirms that the proposed summarization method performs better than a baseline summarization method.