An Approach to Answer Selection in Question-Answering Based on Semantic Relations

Mendes, Ana Cristina; Coheur, Luísa

doi:10.5591/978-1-57735-516-8/IJCAI11-310

An Approach to Answer Selection in Question-Answering Based on Semantic Relations

Ana Cristina Mendes, Luísa Coheur

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Proceedings of the Twenty-Second International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Pages 1852-1856.

https://doi.org/10.5591/978-1-57735-516-8/IJCAI11-310

Abstract

A usual strategy to select the final answer in factoid Question-Answering (QA) relies on redundancy. A score is given to each candidate answer as a function of its frequency of occurrence, and the final answer is selected from the set of candidates sorted in decreasing order of score. For that purpose, systems often try to group together semantically equivalent answers. However, they hold several other semantic relations, such as inclusion, which are not considered, and candidates are mostly seen independently, as competitors. Our hypothesis is that not just equivalence, but other relations between candidate answers have impact on the performance of a redundancy-based QA system. In this paper, we describe experimental studies to back up this hypothesis. Our findings show that, with relatively simple techniques to recognize relations, systems' accuracy can be improved for answers of categories Number, Date and Entity.

Ana Cristina Mendes, and Luísa Coheur. 2011. An Approach to Answer Selection in Question-Answering Based on Semantic Relations. In Proceedings of the Twenty-Second International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI-11. IJCAI, 1852–1856. https://doi.org/10.5591/978-1-57735-516-8/IJCAI11-310

@inproceedings{ijcai2011p310,
  title     = {An Approach to Answer Selection in Question-Answering Based on Semantic Relations},
  author    = {Mendes, Ana Cristina and Coheur, Luísa},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Twenty-Second International Joint Conference on
               Artificial Intelligence, {IJCAI-11}},
  publisher = {AAAI Press/International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence},
  editor    = {Toby Walsh},
  pages     = {1852--1856},
  year      = {2011},
  month     = {7},
  doi       = {10.5591/978-1-57735-516-8/IJCAI11-310},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.5591/978-1-57735-516-8/IJCAI11-310},
}

TY  - CPAPER
TI  - An Approach to Answer Selection in Question-Answering Based on Semantic Relations
AU  - Mendes, Ana Cristina
AU  - Coheur, Luísa
T2  - Proceedings of the Twenty-Second International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI-11
PB  - AAAI Press/International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence
PY  - 2011
SP  - 1852
EP  - 1856
DO  - 10.5591/978-1-57735-516-8/IJCAI11-310
UR  - https://doi.org/10.5591/978-1-57735-516-8/IJCAI11-310
ER  -