A question answering technique that recovers from the question, fragments of what might have been posed as a structured query (SQL), and extracts answer passages based on these fragments (Section §1.3.1).
Published in Chapter:
Question Answering Using Word Associations
Ganesh Ramakrishnan (IBM India Research Labs, India) and Pushpak Bhattacharyya (IIT Bombay, India)
Copyright: © 2009
|Pages: 33
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-59904-990-8.ch033
Abstract
Text mining systems such as categorizers and query retrievers of the first generation were largely hinged on word level statistics and provided a wonderful first-cut approach. However systems based on simple word-level statistics quickly saturate in performance, despite the best data mining and machine learning algorithms. This problem can be traced to the fact that, typically, naive, word-based feature representations are used in text applications, which prove insufficient in bridging two types of chasms within and across documents, viz. lexical chasm and syntactic chasm . The latest wave in text mining technology has been marked by research that will make extraction of subtleties from the underlying meaning of text, a possibility. In the following two chapters, we pose the problem of underlying meaning extraction from text documents, coupled with world knowledge, as a problem of bridging the chasms by exploiting associations between entities. The entities are words or word collocations from documents. We utilize two types of entity associations, viz. paradigmatic (PA) and syntagmatic (SA). We present first-tier algorithms that use these two word associations in bridging the syntactic and lexical chasms. We also propose second-tier algorithms in two sample applications, viz., question answering and text classification which use the first-tier algorithms. Our contribution lies in the specific methods we introduce for exploiting entity association information present in WordNet, dictionaries, corpora and parse trees for improved performance in text mining applications.