Answering Definition Questions Using Multiple Knowledge Sources

Abstract

Definition questions represent a largely unexplored area of question answering—they are different from factoid questions in that the goal is to return as many relevant “nuggets” of information about a concept as possible. We describe a multi-strategy approach to answering such questions using a database constructed offline with surface patterns, a Webbased dictionary, and an off-the-shelf document retriever. Results are presented from component-level evaluation and from an endto-end evaluation of our implemented system at the TREC 2003 Question Answering Track.