2026-09-18T19:17:59Zhttps://dspace.mit.edu/server/oai/requestoai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/416122022-01-13T07:54:29Zcom_1721.1_7582com_1721.1_7581col_1721.1_131023
Boris Katz.
Loreto, Daniel
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
2008-05-19T16:00:45Z
2008-05-19T16:00:45Z
2006
2006
http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/41612
216836072
Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2006.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 61-66).
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.
by Daniel Loreto.
M.Eng.
66 p.
eng
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
M.I.T. theses are protected by
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http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
Exploiting syntactic relations for question answering
Thesis
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