Information Retrieval: Improving Question Answering Systems by Query Reformulation and Answer Validation

Question answering (QA) aims at retrieving precise information from a large collection of documents. Most of the Question Answering systems composed of three main modules: question processing, document processing and answer processing. Question processing module plays an important role in QA systems to reformulate questions. Moreover answer processing module is an emerging topic in QA systems, where these systems are often required to rank and validate candidate answers. These techniques aiming at finding short and precise answers are often based on the semantic relations and co-occurrence keywords. This paper discussed about a new model for question answering which improved two main modules, question processing and answer processing which both affect on the evaluation of the system operations. There are two important components which are the bases of the question processing. First component is question classification that specifies types of question and answer. Second one is reformulation which converts the user's question into an understandable question by QA system in a specific domain. The objective of an Answer Validation task is thus to judge the correctness of an answer returned by a QA system, according to the text snippet given to support it. For validating answers we apply candidate answer filtering, candidate answer ranking and also it has a final validation section by user voting. Also this paper described new architecture of question and answer processing modules with modeling, implementing and evaluating the system. The system differs from most question answering systems in its answer validation model. This module makes it more suitable to find exact answer. Results show that, from total 50 asked questions, evaluation of the model, show 92% improving the decision of the system. Keywords— Answer Processing, Answer validation, Classification, Question Answering and Query Reformulation. Dr. Mohammad Reza Kangavari is Assistant Professor within Department of Computer Engineering(CE), Iran University and Science and Technology, Phone: +98(21)73913305; fax: +98(21)77240469, (email:kangavari@iust.ac.ir) Samira Ghandchi & Manak Golpour are with the Iran University and Science and Technology, phone:+98(21)73913305; fax: +98(21)77240469; (email:samiraghandchi@comp.iust.ac.ir),(e-mail: manakgolpour@comp.iust.ac.ir).