Integrating Web-based and Corpus-based Techniques for Question Answering.
Boris Katz, Jimmy Lin, Daniel Loreto, Wesley Hildebrandt, Matthew W. Bilotti, Sue Felshin, Aaron marian Fernandes, Gregory A. Marton, Federico Mora · 2003
MIT CSAIL's entry in this year's TREC Question Answering track focused on integrating Web-based techniques with more traditional strategies based on document retrieval and named-entity detection. We believe that achieving high performance in the question answering task requires a combination of multiple strategies designed to capitalize on di#erent characteristics of various resources. The system we deployed for the TREC evaluation last year relied exclusively on the World Wide Web to answer factoid questions (Lin et al., 2002). The advantages that the Web o#ers are well known and have been exploited by previous systems (Brill et al., 2001; Clarke et al., 2001; Dumais et al., 2002). The immense amount of freely available unstructured text provides data redundancy, which can be leveraged with simple pattern matching techniques involving the expected answer formulations. In many ways, we can utilize huge quantities of data to overcome many thorny problems in natural langua