Exploiting syntactic relations for question answering
Name
216836072-MIT.pdf
Description
Full printable version
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3.54 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
597845194d9986f5098ac1d29e797c4f
Author(s)
Loreto, Daniel
Advisor(s)
Boris Katz.
Date Issued
2006
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
Recently there has been a resurgent interest in syntax-based approaches to information access, as a means of overcoming the limitations of keyword-based approaches. So far attempts to use syntax have been ad hoc, choosing to use some syntactic information but still ignoring most of the tree structure. This thesis describes the design and implementation of SMARTQA, a proof-of-concept question answering system that compares syntactic trees in a principled manner. Specifically, SMARTQA uses a tree edit-distance algorithm to calculate the similarity between unordered, unrooted syntactic trees. The general case of this problem is NP-complete; in practice, SMARTQA demonstrates that an optimized implementation of the algorithm can be feasibly used for question answering applications.
Description
Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2006.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 61-66).
Subjects
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
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