Experiments with Web QA System and TREC2004Questions

[摘要] We describe our first participation in TREC. We only competed in the Question Answering (QA) category and limited ourruns to factoids. Our approach was to use our open domain QA system that finds the answer among Web pages indexed by acommercial search engine, then project the answer to the TREC test collection. Our Web QA takes advantage of theredundancy of the Web, obtains the candidate answers by pattern matching, then performs probabilistic triangulation of themto assign a final score. Our novel contributions are the following 1) the probabilistic triangulation algorithm, 2) a morepowerful pattern language than used in prior research, and 3) use of semantic features of expected answers instead of relyingon an elaborate hierarchy of question types. Although, we were able to run only first 91 out of 230 factoid questions beforethe submission deadline, we find our result encouraging, and if interpolated to the entire questions set, it would have placed

[学科分类] 社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）