Automated question answering: review of the main approaches

Automated question-answering aims at delivering concise information that contains answers to user questions. This paper reviews and compares three main question-answering approaches based on natural language processing, information retrieval and question templates, eliciting their differences and the context of application that best suits each of them.

[1]  Lynette Hirschman,et al.  Natural language question answering: the view from here , 2001, Natural Language Engineering.

[2]  M VoorheesEllen The TREC question answering track , 2001 .

[3]  Oren Etzioni,et al.  Scaling question answering to the Web , 2001, WWW '01.

[4]  Frank Meng,et al.  Database Query Formation from Natural Language using Semantic Modeling and Statistical Keyword Meani , 1999 .

[5]  Martin M. Soubbotin,et al.  Use of Patterns for Detection of Answer Strings: a Systematic Approach Essentials of the Approach , 2022 .

[6]  Mark Sanderson,et al.  University of Sheffield TREC-8 Q&A System , 1999, TREC.

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

[8]  Eriks Sneiders,et al.  Automated FAQ Answering: Continued Experience with Shallow Language Understanding , 1999 .

[9]  Martin M. Soubbotin,et al.  Use of Patterns for Detection of Likely Answer Strings: A Systematic Approach , 2002, TREC.

[10]  Karen Spärck Jones,et al.  Natural language interfaces to databases , 1990, The Knowledge Engineering Review.

[11]  Sanda M. Harabagiu,et al.  LCC Tools for Question Answering , 2002, TREC.

[12]  Werner Winiwarter AN ADAPTIVE NATURAL LANGUAGE INTERFACE ARCHITECTURE TO ACCESS FAQ KNOWLEDGE BASES , 1999 .

[13]  Nikolaus Ott Aspects of the automatic generation of SQL statements in the Natural Language Query Interface , 1992, Inf. Syst..

[14]  Ellen M. Voorhees,et al.  Overview of the TREC 2002 Question Answering Track , 2003, TREC.

[15]  Richard F. E. Sutcliffe,et al.  Question Answering Using the DLT System at TREC 2002 , 2002, TREC.

[16]  Terry Winograd,et al.  Understanding natural language , 1974 .

[17]  Jimmy J. Lin The Web as a Resource for Question Answering: Perspectives and Challenges , 2002, LREC.

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

[19]  Eduard H. Hovy,et al.  Learning surface text patterns for a Question Answering System , 2002, ACL.

[20]  Raymond J. Mooney,et al.  Learning to Parse Database Queries Using Inductive Logic Programming , 1996, AAAI/IAAI, Vol. 2.

[21]  Jimmy J. Lin,et al.  Data-Intensive Question Answering , 2001, TREC.

[22]  Peter Thanisch,et al.  Natural language interfaces to databases – an introduction , 1995, Natural Language Engineering.

[23]  James H. Martin,et al.  Speech and language processing: an introduction to natural language processing, computational linguistics, and speech recognition, 2nd Edition , 2000, Prentice Hall series in artificial intelligence.

[24]  Graeme Hirst,et al.  Lexical Cohesion Computed by Thesaural relations as an indicator of the structure of text , 1991, CL.

[25]  Dayne Freitag,et al.  Toward General-Purpose Learning for Information Extraction , 1998, ACL.

[26]  Raymond J. Mooney,et al.  Automatic Construction of Semantic Lexicons for Learning Natural Language Interfaces , 1999, AAAI/IAAI.

[27]  Horacio Saggion,et al.  The University of Sheffield's TREC 2003 Q&A Experiments , 2003, TREC.

[28]  Xuanjing Huang,et al.  FDUQA on TREC2003 QA task , 2003, TREC.

[29]  C. Jacquemin,et al.  Document selection refinement based on linguistic features for QALC , a Question Answering system , 2001 .

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

[31]  Jimmy J. Lin,et al.  Omnibase: Uniform Access to Heterogeneous Data for Question Answering , 2002, NLDB.

[32]  Yorick Wilks,et al.  Information Extraction: Beyond Document Retrieval , 1998, Int. J. Comput. Linguistics Chin. Lang. Process..

[33]  Eriks Sneiders,et al.  Automated question answering : template-based approach , 2002 .

[34]  Thomas R. Gruber,et al.  A translation approach to portable ontology specifications , 1993 .

[35]  Elizabeth D. Liddy,et al.  Question Answering: CNLP at the TREC 2002 Question Answering Track , 2002, TREC.

[36]  Wei Li,et al.  Information Extraction Supported Question Answering , 1999, TREC.

[37]  Fabio Rinaldi,et al.  NLP for answer extraction in technical domains , 2003 .

[38]  Sharon M. Walter Review of Evaluating natural language processing systems: an analysis and review by Karen Sparck Jones and Julia R. Galliers. Springer-Verlag 1995. , 1998 .

[39]  Ellen Riloff,et al.  Information extraction as a basis for high-precision text classification , 1994, TOIS.

[40]  Karen Sparck Jones Natural Language Processing: A Historical Review , 1994 .

[41]  Boris Katz,et al.  Annotating the World Wide Web using Natural Language , 1997, RIAO.

[42]  Claire Cardie,et al.  UMass/Hughes: Description of the CIRCUS System Used for MUC-51 , 1993, MUC.

[43]  James Allan,et al.  Approaches to passage retrieval in full text information systems , 1993, SIGIR.

[44]  Jean-Louis Binot,et al.  Natural Language Interfaces: A new philosophy , 1991 .

[45]  Jimmy J. Lin,et al.  Natural Language Annotations for the Semantic Web , 2002, OTM.

[46]  George A. Miller,et al.  WordNet: A Lexical Database for English , 1995, HLT.

[47]  Robert M. Losee,et al.  Learning Syntactic Rules and Tags with Genetic Algorithms for Information Retrieval and Filtering: An Empirical Basis for Grammatical Rules , 1995, Inf. Process. Manag..

[48]  Eriks Sneiders,et al.  Automated Question Answering Using Question Templates That Cover the Conceptual Model of the Database , 2002, NLDB.