Within a Question Answering (QA) framework, Question Context plays a vital role. We define Question Context to be background knowledge that can be used to represent the user’s information need more completely than the terms in the query alone. This paper proposes a novel approach that uses statistical language modeling techniques to develop a semantic Question Context which we then incorporate ...

ion over Parts of Speech. Lexical units are grouped into frames irrespective of their parts of speech. This allows to easily map, e. g., two text fragments onto each other that carry essentially the same meaning, but where one is headed by a verb and the other by a noun, such as ‘A bought B’ vs. ‘(the) acquisition of B by A’. In GermaNet, this mapping requires additional knowledge in the form o...

SHAPE ADJECTIVE COLOR DISEASE TEXT NARRATIVE* GENERAL-INFO DEFINITION USE EXPRESSION-ORIGIN HISTORY WHY-FAMOUS BIO ANTECEDENT INFLUENCE CONSEQUENT CAUSE-EFFECT METHOD-MEANS CIRCUMSTANCE-MEANS REASON EVALUATION PRO-CON CONTRAST RATING COUNSEL-ADVICE

Abduction can be viewed as self-questioning, where the search for an explanation is analogous to answering a “why” question. The question is of the form Why P?, where P is an observation or fact that has come to an agent’s attention. An abductive hypothesis is a possible answer to the question Why P? When abduction is viewed as a type of question answering, abductive hypotheses can be seen as a...

AnswerBus1 is an open-domain question answering system based on sentence level Web information retrieval. It accepts users’ natural-language questions in English, German, French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese and provides answers in English. Five search engines and directories are used to retrieve Web pages that are relevant to user questions. From the Web pages, AnswerBus extracts sentences ...

Evaluating Question Answering (QA) Systems is a very complex task: state-of-the-art systems involve processing whose influences and contributions on the final result are not clear and need to be studied. We present some key points on different aspects of the QA Systems (QAS) evaluation: mainly, as performed during large-scale campaigns, but also with clues on the evaluation of QAS typical softw...