Use of WordNet hypernyms for answering what-is questions
John M. Prager, Jennifer Chu‐Carroll, Krzysztof Czuba · 2001
We present a preliminary analysis of the use of WordNet hypernyms for answering "What-is" questions. We analyse the approximately 130 definitional questions in the TREC10 corpus with respect to our technique of Virtual Annotation (VA), which has previously been shown to be effective on the TREC9 definitional question set and other questions. We discover that VA is effective on a subset of the TREC10 definitional questions, but that some of these questions seem to need a user model to generate correct answers, or at least answers that agree with the NIST judges. Furthermore, there remains a large enough subset of definitional questions that cannot benefit at all from the WordNet isa-hierarchy, prompting the need to investigate alternative external resources.