We present a new technique for question answering called Predictive Annotation. Predictive Annotation identifies potential answers to questions in text, annotates them accordingly and indexes them. This technique, along with a complementary analysis of questions, passage-level ranking and answer selection, produces a system effective at answering natural-language fact-seeking questions posed against large document collections. Experimental results show the effects of differentparameter settings and lead to a numberof general observations about the question-answeringproblem.
John M. Prager, Eric W. Brown, Anni Coden, Dragomi