Answering definitional questions before they are asked
Name
62242506-MIT.pdf
Description
Full printable version
Size
3.51 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
79e282b335356a747d51868ba3c4d035
Author(s)
Fernandes, Aaron D. (Aaron David)
Advisor(s)
Boris Katz.
Date Issued
2004
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
Most question answering systems narrow down their search space by issuing a boolean IR query on a keyword indexed corpus. This technique often proves futile for definitional questions, because they only contain one keyword or name. Thus, an IR search for only that term is likely to produce many spurious results; documents that contain mentions of the keyword, but not in a definitional context. An alternative approach is to glean the corpus in pre-processing for syntactic constructs in which entities are defined. In this thesis, I describe a regular expression language for detecting such constructs, with the help of a part-of-speech tagger and a named-entity recognizer. My system, named CoL. ForBIN, extracts entities and their definitions, and stores them in a database. This reduces the task of definitional question answering to a simple database lookup.
Description
Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2004.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 75-77).
Subjects
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
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