Experiments with Web QA System and TREC 2004 Questions

We describe our first participation in TREC. We only competed in the Question Answering (QA) category and limited our runs to factoids. Our approach was to use our open domain QA system that finds the answer among Web pages indexed by a commercial search engine, then project the answer to the TREC test collection. Our Web QA takes advantage of the redundancy of the Web, obtains the candidate answers by pattern matching, then performs probabilistic triangulation of them to assign a final score. Our novel contributions are the following 1) the probabilistic triangulation algorithm, 2) a more powerful pattern language than used in prior research, and 3) use of semantic features of expected answers instead of relying on an elaborate hierarchy of question types. Although, we were able to run only first 91 out of 230 factoid questions before the submission deadline, we find our result encouraging, and if interpolated to the entire questions set, it would have placed us above the median perf...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: TREC
• Authors: Dmitri Roussinov, Yin Ding, Jose Antonio Robles-Flores
• Keywords: Factoid Questions, Probabilistic Triangulation, QA Takes Advantage, TREC 2004, TREC 2008