Improving Text Retrieval Precision and Answer Accuracy in Question Answering Systems

Question Answering (QA) systems are often built modularly, with a text retrieval component feeding forward into an answer extraction component. Conventional wisdom suggests that, the higher the quality of the retrieval results used as input to the answer extraction module, the better the extracted answers, and hence system accuracy, will be. This turns out to be a poor assumption, because text retrieval and answer extraction are tightly coupled. Improvements in retrieval quality can be lost at the answer extraction module, which can not necessarily recognize the additional answer candidates provided by improved retrieval. Going forward, to improve accuracy on the QA task, systems will need greater coordination between text retrieval and answer extraction modules.