Cooking is a common and an information-intensive activity. We analyze a set of 678 cooking-related queries to identify the attributes that cooks provide in their queries to the Google Answers TM ‘ask an expert’ online reference system. The results suggest directions to take in developing an effective organization and improved functionality for a cooking-focused digital library.

Community-based question-answering (CQA) services contribute to solving many difficult questions we have. For each question in such services, one best answer can be designated, among all answers, often by the asker. However, many questions on typical CQA sites are left without a best answer even if when good candidates are available. In this paper, we attempt to address the problem of predictin...

In this paper, we describe answer extraction method for non-factoid questions. We classified non-factoid type questions into three types: why type, definition type and how type. We analyzed each type of questions and developed answer extraction patterns for these types of questions. For automatic evaluation, we have developed BE based evaluation tool for answers of questions. BE method is origi...

Recently there is a need for a QA system to answer not only factoid questions but also descriptive questions. Descriptive questions are questions which need answers that contain definitional information about the search term or describe some special events. We have proposed a new descriptive QA model and presented the result of a system which we have built to answer descriptive questions. We de...