Answering what-is questions by Virtual Annotation
John M. Prager, Dragomir Radev, Krzysztof Czuba · 2001
We present the technique of Virtual Annotation as a specialization of Predictive Annotation for answering definitional What is questions. These questions generally have the property that the type of the answer is not given away by the question, which poses problems for a system which has to select answer strings from suggested passages. Virtual Annotation uses a combination of knowledge-based techniques using an ontology, and statistical techniques using a large corpus to achieve high precision.