Syntactic Clues and Lexical Resources in Question-Answering

CL Research's question-answering system (DIMAP-QA) for TREC-9 significantly extends its semantic relation triple (logical form) technology in which documents are fully parsed and databases built around discourse entities. This extension further exploits parsing output, most notably appositives and relative clauses, which are quite useful for question-answering. Further, DIMAP-QA integrated machine-readable lexical resources: a full-sized dictionary and a thesaurus with entries linked to specific dictionary definitions. The dictionary's 270,000 definitions were fully parsed and semantic relations extracted toprovide a MindNet-like semantic network; the thesaurus was reorganized into a WordNet file structure. DIMAP-QA uses these lexical resources, along with other methods, to support a just-in-time design that eliminates preprocessing for named-entity extraction, statistical subcategorization patterning, anaphora resolution, ontology development, and unguided query expansion. ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: TREC
• Authors: Kenneth C. Litkowski
• Keywords: Lexical Resources, Machine-readable Lexical Resources, Semantic Relations, TREC 2000, TREC 2008