A Web-based Chinese question answering with answering validation

Question answering system can give users precise answer to the question presented in natural language. This paper describes a Chinese question answering system, which can find answer on the Web. The system only utilizes the "snippet" in the result returned by Web search engine as data resource for answer extraction. The paper presents an answer extraction method which is based on the calculation of sentence similarity between question and answer. One novel characteristic of this system is its answer validation method, which combines similarity calculation and correlation calculation together to select answer from a pool of candidate answers. The experiment result shows it is more effective than common answer selection methods.