Answering Definition Questions Using Multiple Knowledge Sources

Definition questions represent a largely unexplored area of question answering--they are different from factoid questions in that the goal is to return as many relevant "nuggets" of information about a concept as possible. We describe a multi-strategy approach to answering such questions using a database constructed offline with surface patterns, a Webbased dictionary, and an off-the-shelf document retriever. Results are presented from component-level evaluation and from an endto-end evaluation of our implemented system at the TREC 2003 Question Answering Track.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: NAACL
• Authors: Wesley Hildebrandt, Boris Katz, Jimmy J. Lin
• Keywords: Database Constructed Offline, NAACL 2004, NAACL 2007, Off-the-shelf Document Retriever, Trec 2003 Question