Information Extraction Supported Question Answering
Rohini K. Srihari, Wei Li · 1999
This paper discusses the use of our information extraction (IE) system, Textract, in the questionanswering (QA) track of the recently held TREC-8 tests. One of our major objectives is to examine how IE can help IR (Information Retrieval) in applications like QA. Our study shows: (i) IE can provide solid support for QA; (ii) low-level IE like Named Entity tagging is often a necessary component in handling most types of questions; (iii) a robust natural language shallow parser provides a structural basis for handling questions; (iv) high-level domain independent IE, i.e. extraction of multiple relationships and general events, is expected to bring about a breakthrough in QA. 1 Introduction Natural language QA (Question Answering) is an ideal test bed for demonstrating the power of IE (Information Extraction). In our vision, there is a natural co-operation between IE and IR (Information Retrieval). An important question then is, what type of IE can support IR in QA and how well does it s...