The structure and performance of an open-domain question answering system

Abstract

This paper presents the architecture, operation and results obtained with the LASSO Question Answering system developed in the Natural Language Processing Laboratory at SMU. To find answers, the system relies on a combination of syntactic and semantic techniques. The search for the answer is based on a novel form of indexing called paragraph indexing. A score of 55.5% for short answers and 64.5% for long answers was achieved at the TREC-8 competition.