A Definitional Question Answering System Based on Phrase Extraction Using Syntactic Patterns

Abstract

We propose a definitional question answering system that extracts phrases using syntactic patterns which are easily constructed manually and can reduce the coverage problem. Experimental results show that our phrase extraction system outperforms a sentence extraction system, especially for selecting concise answers, in terms of recall and precision, and indicate that the proper text unit of answer candidates and the final answer has a significant effect on the system performance.