FIDJI: using syntax for validating answers in multiple documents

This article presents FIDJI, a question-answering (QA) system for French. FIDJI combines syntactic information with traditional QA techniques such as named entity recognition and term weighting; it does not require any pre-processing other than classical search engine indexing. Among other uses of syntax, we experiment in this system the validation of answers through different documents, as well as specific techniques for answering different types of questions (e.g. yes/no or list questions). We present several experiments which show the benefits of syntactic analysis, as well as multi-document validation. Different types of questions and corpora are tested, and specificities are commented. Links with result aggregation are also discussed.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: IR
• Authors: Véronique Moriceau, Xavier Tannier
• Keywords: IR 2010, Natural Language Processing, Questions, Search Engine Indexing, Traditional Qa Techniques