A Multilingual Framework for Searching Definitions on Web Snippets

This work presents Mdef-WQA , a system that searches for answers to definition questions in several languages on web snippets. For this purpose, Mdef-WQA biases the search engine in favour of some syntactic structures that often convey definitions. Once descriptive sentences are identified, Mdef-WQA clusters them by potential sensesand presents the most relevant phrases of each potential senseto the user. The approach was assessed with TREC and CLEF data. As a result, Mdef-WQA was able to extract descriptive information for all definition questions in the TREC 2001 and 2003 data-sets.

[1]  Paolo Rosso,et al.  INAOE-UPV Joint Participation in CLEF 2005: Experiments in Monolingual Question Answering , 2005, CLEF.

[2]  Fredric C. Gey,et al.  Accessing Multilingual Information Repositories, 6th Workshop of the Cross-Language Evalution Forum, CLEF 2005, Vienna, Austria, 21-23 September, 2005, Revised Selected Papers , 2006, CLEF.

[3]  Paolo Rosso,et al.  A Full Data-Driven System for Multiple Language Question Answering , 2005, CLEF.

[4]  Maarten de Rijke,et al.  Overview of the CLEF 2004 Multilingual Question Answering Track , 2004, CLEF.

[5]  Jaime Carbonell,et al.  Multi-Document Summarization By Sentence Extraction , 2000 .

[6]  Tat-Seng Chua,et al.  A Comparative Study on Sentence Retrieval for Definitional Question Answering , 2004 .

[7]  G. Miller,et al.  Cognitive science. , 1981, Science.

[8]  Ellen M. Voorhees.  Evaluating Answers to Definition Questions , 2003, HLT-NAACL.

[9]  Ion Androutsopoulos,et al.  Learning to Identify Single-Snippet Answers to Definition Questions , 2004, COLING.

[10]  Martin M. Soubbotin.  Patterns of Potential Answer Expressions as Clues to the Right Answers , 2001, TREC.

[11]  Mark Sanderson,et al.  Large scale testing of a descriptive phrase finder , 2001, HLT.

[12]  Richard A. Harshman,et al.  Indexing by Latent Semantic Analysis , 1990, J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci..

[13]  Peter Wiemer-Hastings,et al.  Rules for Syntax, Vectors for Semantics , 2001 .

[14]  Valentin Jijkoun,et al.  Overview of the CLEF 2006 Multilingual Question Answering Track , 2006, CLEF.

[15]  M. de Rijke,et al.  Overview of the CLEF 2005 Multilingual Question Answering Track , 2005, CLEF.

[16]  Manuel Montes-y-Gómez,et al.  A Text Mining Approach for Definition Question Answering , 2006, FinTAL.

[17]  Mark Sanderson,et al.  Retrieving descriptive phrases from large amounts of free text , 2000, CIKM '00.