Automatic Question Answering

We have developed a method for answering single answer questions automatically using a collection of documents or the Internet as a source of data for the production of the answer. Examples of such questions are `What is the melting point of tin?', and `Who wrote the novel Moby Dick?'. The approach we have adopted to the problem uses the Mikrokosmos ontology to represent knowledge about question and answer content. A specialized lexicon of English connects words, in English, to their ontological meanings. Analysis of texts (both questions and documents) is based on a statistical part-of speech tagger, and pattern-based proper name and fact classification and phrase recognition. The system assumes that all the information required to produce an answer exists in a single sentence and retrieval strategies (where possible) are geared to finding documents in which this is the case. In this paper we describe the overall structure of the system and the operation of the various comp...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: RIAO
• Authors: James R. Cowie, Yevgeny Ludovik, Hugo Molina-Salgado, Sergei Nirenburg, Svetlana Sheremetyeva
• Keywords: English Connects Words, Part-of Speech Tagger, RIAO 2000, RIAO 2007, Single Answer Questions