Experiments at the university of Edinburgh for the TREC 2006 QA track

Abstract

We describe experiments carried out at the University of Edinburgh for our TREC 2006 QA participation. Our main effort was to develop an approach to QA that is based on frame semantics. Two algorithms were implemented to this end, building on the lexical resources FrameNet, PropBank and VerbNet. The first algorithm uses the resources to generate potential answer templates to a given question, which are then used to pose exact, quoted queries to a web search engine and confirm which of the results contain an actual answer to the question. The second algorithm bases search queries on key words only, but it can recognize answers in a wider range of syntactic variants in its candidate sentence analysis stage. We discuss both approaches when applied to each of the resources and a combination of these. We also describe how–in a later step–the found answer candidates are mapped to the AQUAINT corpus and how we answered other questions. 1