The Use of Question Types to Match Questions in FAQFinder

One useful way to find the answer to a question is to search a library of previously-answered questions. This is the idea behind FAQFinder, a Web-based natural language questionanswering system which uses Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) files to answer users’ questions. FAQFinder tries to answer a user’s question by retrieving a similar FAQ question, if one exists, and its answer. FAQFinder uses several metrics to judge the similarity of user and FAQ questions. In this paper, we discuss a metric based on question type, which we recently added to the system. We discuss the taxonomy of question types used, and present experimental results which indicate that the incorporation of question type information has substantially improved FAQFinder’s performance.

[1]  Noriko Tomuro,et al.  The Use of WordNet Sense Tagging in FAQFinder , 2000 .

[2]  Claire Cardie,et al.  Examining the Role of Statistical and Linguistic Knowledge Sources in a General-Knowledge Question-Answering System , 2000, ANLP.

[3]  Ellen M. Voorhees,et al.  The TREC-8 Question Answering Track Report , 1999, TREC.

[4]  Kristian J. Hammond,et al.  Question Answering from Frequently Asked Question Files: Experiences with the FAQ FINDER System , 1997, AI Mag..

[5]  Noriko Tomuro,et al.  Selecting Features for Paraphrasing Question Sentences , 2001 .

[6]  Sahibsingh A. Dudani.  The Distance-Weighted k-Nearest-Neighbor Rule , 1976, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics.

[7]  Eric Brill,et al.  Transformation-Based Error-Driven Learning and Natural Language Processing: A Case Study in Part-of-Speech Tagging , 1995, CL.

[8]  Ulf Hermjakob,et al.  Parsing and Question Classification for Question Answering , 2001, ACL 2001.

[9]  Alex Lascarides,et al.  Indirect Speech Acts , 2001, Synthese.

[10]  Michael Collins,et al.  Answer Extraction , 2000, ANLP.

[11]  Sanda M. Harabagiu,et al.  FALCON: Boosting Knowledge for Answer Engines , 2000, TREC.

[12]  Eduard H. Hovy,et al.  Toward Semantics-Based Answer Pinpointing , 2001, HLT.

[13]  David G. Lowe,et al.  Similarity Metric Learning for a Variable-Kernel Classifier , 1995, Neural Computation.

[14]  Gerard Salton,et al.  The SMART Retrieval System—Experiments in Automatic Document Processing , 1971 .

[15]  Michael McGill,et al.  Introduction to Modern Information Retrieval , 1983 .

[16]  Wendy Grace Lehnert,et al.  The Process of Question Answering , 2022 .