Answer Validation by Information Distance Calculation

In this paper, an information distance based approach is proposed to perform answer validation for question answering system. To validate an answer candidate, the approach calculates the conditional information distance between the question focus and the candidate under certain condition pattern set. Heuristic methods are designed to extract question focus and generate proper condition patterns from question. General search engines are employed to estimate the Kolmogorov complexity, hence the information distance. Experimental results show that our approach is stable and flexible, and outperforms traditional tfidf methods.