Linguistic Knowledge and Question Answering

Abstract

The availability of robust and deep syntactic parsing can improve the performance of all modules of a Question Answering system. In this article, this is illustrated using examples from our QA system Joost, a Dutch QA system which has been used for both open and closed domain QA. The system can make use of information found in the fully parsed version of the document collections. We demonstrate that this improves the performance of various components of the system, such as answer extraction and selection, lexical acquisition, off-line relation extraction, and passage retrieval.