Coping with Alternate Formulations of Questions and Answers

Brigitte Grau (1) , Olivier Ferret (1) , Martine Hurault-Plantet (1) , Christian Jacquemin (1) , Laura Monceaux (1) , Isabelle Robba (1) , Anne Vilnat (1)

1 LIMSI - Laboratoire d'Informatique pour la Mécanique et les Sciences de l'Ingénieur

We present in this chapter the QALC system which has participated in the four TREC QA evaluations. We focus here on the problem of linguistic variation in order to be able to relate questions and answers. We present first, variation at the term level which consists in retrieving questions terms in document sentences even if morphologic, syntactic or semantic variations alter them. Our second subject matter concerns variation at the sentence level that we handle as different partial reformulations of questions. Questions are associated with extraction patterns based on the question syntactic type and the object that is under query. We present the whole system thus allowing situating how QALC deals with variation, and different evaluations.

Keywords: question-answering

Domains: Document and Text Processing; Information Retrieval [cs.IR]

Brigitte Grau, Olivier Ferret, Martine Hurault-Plantet, Christian Jacquemin, Laura Monceaux, et al.. Coping with Alternate Formulations of Questions and Answers. Strzalkowski & Harabagiu (eds). Advances in Open-Domain Question-Answering, Springer Netherlands, pp.Vol. 32 - 189-226, 2006, Series: Text, Speech and Language Technology,, ⟨10.1007/978-1-4020-4746-6⟩. ⟨hal-00486130⟩