Web-Based Multiple Choice Question Answering for English and Arabic Questions

Answering multiple-choice questions, where a set of possible answers is provided together with the question, constitutes a simplified but nevertheless challenging area in question answering research. This paper introduces and evaluates two novel techniques for answer selection. It furthermore analyses in how far performance figures obtained using the English language Web as data source can be transferred to less dominant languages on the Web, such as Arabic. Result evaluation is based on questions from both the English and the Arabic versions of the TV show "Who wants to be a Millionaire?" as well as on the TREC-2002 QA data.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: ECIR
• Authors: Rawia Awadallah, Andreas Rauber
• Keywords: ECIR 2006, English Language Web, Information Technology, Multiple-choice Questions, Question Answering Research