Finding Answers in Web Search
Evi Yulianti · 2015
There are many informational queries that could be answered with a text passage, thereby not requiring the searcher to access the full web document. When building manual annotations of answer passages for TREC queries, Keikha et al. [6] confirmed that many such queries can be answered with just passages. By presenting the answers directly in the search result page, user information needs will be addressed more rapidly so that reduces user interaction (click) with the search result page [3] and gives a significant positive effect on user satisfaction [2, 7]. In the context of general web search, the problem of finding answer passages has not been explored extensively. Retrieving relevant passages has been studied in TREC HARD track [1] and in INEX [5], but relevant passages are not required to contain answers. One of the tasks in the TREC genomics track [4] was to find answer passages on biomedical literature. Previous work has shown that current passage retrieval methods that focus on topical relevance are not effective at finding answers [6]. Therefore, more knowledge is required to identify answers in a document. Bernstein et al. [2] has studied an approach to extract inline direct answers for search result using paid crowdsourcing service. Such an approach, however, is expensive and not practical to be applied for all possible information needs. A fully automatic process in finding answers remains a research challenge.