Extracting Answers from the Web Using Data Annotation and Knowledge Mining Techniques

Aranea is a question answering system that extracts answers from the World Wide Web using knowledge annotation and knowledge mining techniques. Knowledge annotation, which utilizes semistructured database techniques, is effective for answering large classes of commonly occurring questions. Knowledge mining, which utilizes statistical techniques, can leverage the massive amounts of data available on the Web to overcome many natural language processing challenges. Aranea integrates these two different paradigms of question answering into a single framework. For the TREC evaluation, we also explored the problem of answer projection, or finding supporting documents for our Web-derived answers from the AQUAINT corpus.