Patterns of Potential Answer Expressions as Clues to the Right Answers.
Martin M. Soubbotin · 2001
The core of our question-answering mechanism is searching for predefined patterns of textual expressions that may be interpreted as answers to certain types of questions. The presence of such patterns in analyzed answer-string candidates may provide evidence of the right answer. The answer-string candidates are created by cutting up relatively-large source documents passages containing the query terms or their synonyms/substitutes. indicative patterns. The specificity of our approach is:- placing the use of indicative patterns in the core of the QA approach;- aiming at the comprehensive and systematic use of such indicators;- defining various structural types of the indicative patterns, including nontrivial and sophisticated ones;- developing accessory techniques that ensure effective performance of the approach. We believe that the use of indicative patterns for question answering can be considered as a special case of the more general approach to text information retrieval that contrasts with linguisticsoriented methodology.