A Multi-Strategy and Multi-Source Approach to Question Answering

Traditional question answering systems typically employ a single pipeline architecture, consisting roughly of three components: question analysis, search, and answer selection (see e.g., (Clarke et al., 2001a; Hovy et al., 2000; Moldovan et al., 2000; Prager et al., 2000)). The knowledge sources utilized by these systems to date primarily focus on the corpus from which answers are to be retrieved, WordNet, and the Web (see e.g., (Clarke et al., 2001b; Pasca and Harabagiu, 2001; Prager et al., 2001)). More recent research has shown that introducing feedback loops into the traditional pipeline architecture results in a performance gain (Harabagiu et al., 2001).