A Noisy-Channel Approach to Question Answering

We introduce a probabilistic noisy-channel model for question answering and we show how it can be exploited in the context of an end-to-end QA system. Our noisy-channel system outperforms a state-of-the-art rule-based QA system that uses similar resources. We also show that the model we propose is flexible enough to accommodate within one mathematical framework many QA-specific resources and techniques, which range from the exploitation of WordNet, structured, and semi-structured databases to reasoning, and paraphrasing.

[1]  Boris Katz.  Omnibase: A Universal Data Source Interface , 2002 .

[2]  Frederick Jelinek,et al.  Statistical methods for speech recognition , 1997 .

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

[4]  Scott Miller,et al.  TREC 2002 QA at BBN: Answer Selection and Confidence Estimation , 2002, TREC.

[5]  Jennifer Chu-Carroll,et al.  Use of WordNet Hypernyms for Answering What-Is Questions , 2001, TREC.

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

[7]  Eduard H. Hovy,et al.  The Use of External Knowledge of Factoid QA , 2001, TREC.

[8]  Ion Muslea,et al.  Extraction Patterns for Information Extraction Tasks: A Survey , 1999 .

[9]  Sanda M. Harabagiu,et al.  The Informative Role of WordNet in Open-Domain Question Answering , 2004, HLT-NAACL 2004.

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

[11]  John D. Lafferty,et al.  Information Retrieval as Statistical Translation , 2017 .

[12]  Charles L. A. Clarke,et al.  Web Reinforced Question Answering (MultiTest Experiments for TREC 2001) , 2001, TREC.

[13]  David Yarowsky,et al.  Statistical Machine Translation: Final Report , 1999 .

[14]  Salim Roukos,et al.  IBM's Statistical Question Answering System-TREC 11 , 2001, TREC.

[15]  Daniel Marcu,et al.  Summarization beyond sentence extraction: A probabilistic approach to sentence compression , 2002, Artif. Intell..

[16]  Kenneth Ward Church.  A Stochastic Parts Program and Noun Phrase Parser for Unrestricted Text , 1988, ANLP.

[17]  Robert L. Mercer,et al.  The Mathematics of Statistical Machine Translation: Parameter Estimation , 1993, CL.

[18]  Daniel Marcu,et al.  Natural Language Based Reformulation Resource and Wide Exploitation for Question Answering , 2002, TREC.