Is it the right answer?

Abstract

Answer Validation is an emerging topic in Question Answering, where open domain systems are often required to rank huge amounts of candidate answers. We present a novel approach to answer validation based on the intuition that the amount of implicit knowledge which connects an answer to a question can be quantitatively estimated by exploiting the redundancy of Web information. Experiments carried out on the TREC-2001 judged-answer collection show that the approach achieves a high level of performance (i.e. 81% success rate). The simplicity and the efficiency of this approach make it suitable to be used as a module in Question Answering systems.