Web question answering: is more always better?

TitleWeb question answering: is more always better?
Publication TypeConference Papers
Year of Publication2002
AuthorsDumais S, Banko M, Brill E, Jimmy Lin, Ng A
Conference NameProceedings of the 25th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval
Date Published2002///
PublisherACM
Conference LocationNew York, NY, USA
ISBN Number1-58113-561-0
Abstract

This paper describes a question answering system that is designed to capitalize on the tremendous amount of data that is now available online. Most question answering systems use a wide variety of linguistic resources. We focus instead on the redundancy available in large corpora as an important resource. We use this redundancy to simplify the query rewrites that we need to use, and to support answer mining from returned snippets. Our system performs quite well given the simplicity of the techniques being utilized. Experimental results show that question answering accuracy can be greatly improved by analyzing more and more matching passages. Simple passage ranking and n-gram extraction techniques work well in our system making it efficient to use with many backend retrieval engines.

URLhttp://doi.acm.org/10.1145/564376.564428
DOI10.1145/564376.564428