A prototype question answering system using syntactic and semantic information for answer retrieval

Abstract

Introduction This was our first entry at TREC and the system we presented was, due to time constraints, an incomplete prototype. Our main aims were to verify the usefulness of syntactic analysis for QA and to experiment with different semantic distance metrics in view of a more complete and fully integrated future system. To this end we made use of a part-of-speech tagger and NP chunker in conjunction with entity recognition and semantic distance metrics. We also envisaged experimenting with a shallow best first parser but time factors meant integration with the rest of the system was not achieved. Unfortunately due to time constraints no testing and no parameter tuning was carried out prior TREC. This in turn meant that a number of small bugs negatively influenced our results. Moreover it was not possible to carry out experiments in parameter tuning, meaning our system did not achieve optimal performance. Nevertheless we obtained reasonable results, the best score being 18.1% of the