Combining semantic information in question answering systems

This paper presents two proposals based on semantic information, semantic roles and WordNet, for the answer extraction module of a general open-domain question answering (QA) system. The main objective of this research is to determine how the system performance is influenced by using this kind of information, and compare it with that of current QA systems based on named entities (NEs). NE-based QA systems achieve good results with NE-based questions. However, with common noun (CN) based questions, like ''Where is the stomach? In the abdomen'', they fail, and this is the main reason for our study. In this paper our new proposals for answering different types of questions are evaluated and compared with an NE-based approach for both NE-based and CN-based questions. From the results obtained it may be concluded that, with the aid of our proposals, the QA system performs much better with CN-based questions when semantic information is used (semantic information F"@b"="1=74.73% vs. NEF"@b"="1=12.19%). Moreover, the more semantic information the system uses, the better the precision and correctness of the answer it achieves.

[1]  Richard Roderick Burton.  Semantic grammar: a technique for efficient language understanding in limited domains. , 1976 .

[2]  Christiane Fellbaum,et al.  Book Reviews: WordNet: An Electronic Lexical Database , 1999, CL.

[3]  Paloma Moreda,et al.  The Role of Verb Sense Disambiguation in Semantic Role Labeling , 2006, FinTAL.

[4]  Lance A. Miller,et al.  Review of The process of question answering: a computer simulation of cognition by Wendy G. Lehnert. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates 1978. , 1980 .

[5]  Diego Mollá Aliod,et al.  Extracting Exact Answers using a Meta Question Answering System , 2005, ALTA.

[6]  Wai Lam,et al.  Using Semantic Relations with World Knowledge for Question Answering , 2006, TREC.

[7]  C. Fellbaum.  An Electronic Lexical Database , 1998 .

[8]  Wendy Grace Lehnert,et al.  The Process of Question Answering , 2022 .

[9]  Piek Vossen.  Building a Multilingual Database with Wordnets for European Languages , 1998 .

[10]  Charles J. Fillmore,et al.  THE CASE FOR CASE. , 1967 .

[11]  Ranadhir Ghosh,et al.  A semantic approach to boost passage retrieval effectiveness for question answering , 2006, ACSC.

[12]  Gerhard Fliedner,et al.  Linguistically Informed Question Answering , 2007 .

[13]  Richard Edward Cullingford,et al.  Script application: computer understanding of newspaper stories. , 1977 .

[14]  Krzysztof Czuba,et al.  Answering What-Is Questions by Virtual Annotation , 2001, HLT.

[15]  Bonnie Lynn Webber,et al.  Question Answering based on Semantic Roles , 2007, ACL 2007.

[16]  Gökhan Tür,et al.  QASR: question answering using semantic roles for speech interface , 2006, INTERSPEECH.

[17]  Roberto Basili,et al.  Exploiting Syntactic and Shallow Semantic Kernels for Question Answer Classification , 2007, ACL.

[18]  Sanda M. Harabagiu,et al.  Question Answering Based on Semantic Structures , 2004, COLING.

[19]  Andreas Merkel,et al.  The Alyssa System at TREC QA 2007: Do We Need Blog06? , 2007, TREC.

[20]  Bert F. Green,et al.  Baseball: an automatic question-answerer , 1899, IRE-AIEE-ACM '61 (Western).

[21]  Paloma Moreda,et al.  Corpus-based semantic role approach in information retrieval , 2007, Data Knowl. Eng..

[22]  Wayne H. Ward,et al.  Target Word Detection and Semantic Role Chunking using Support Vector Machines , 2003, NAACL.

[23]  Daniel Jurafsky,et al.  Automatic Labeling of Semantic Roles , 2002, CL.

[24]  Leila Kosseim,et al.  Using Semantic Constraints to Improve Question Answering , 2006, NLDB.

[25]  Leonard Bolc,et al.  Natural language question answering systems , 1980 .

[26]  Jeffrey Gruber.  Studies in lexical relations , 1965 .

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

[28]  Jong-Hyeok Lee,et al.  Question Answering Approach Using a WordNet-based Answer Type Taxonomy , 2002, TREC.

[29]  José Luis Vicedo González,et al.  Addressing ontology-based question answering with collections of user queries , 2009, Inf. Process. Manag..

[30]  Robert F. Simmons,et al.  Computational Linguistics Natural Language Question- Answering Systems: 1969 , 2022 .

[31]  Berthold Crysmann,et al.  Question answering from structured knowledge sources , 2007, J. Appl. Log..

[32]  Michael Colclough.  The Process of Question Answering — A Computer Simulation of Cognition , 1979 .

[33]  Ranadhir Ghosh,et al.  A Hybrid Question Answering Schema Using Encapsulated Semantics in Lexical Resources , 2006, Australian Conference on Artificial Intelligence.

[34]  J. Hobbs,et al.  Using and Extending WordNet to Support Question- Answering , 2007 .

[35]  Daniel Gildea,et al.  The Proposition Bank: An Annotated Corpus of Semantic Roles , 2005, CL.