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A Text Mining Approach for Definition Question Answering

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Advances in Natural Language Processing (FinTAL 2006)

Abstract

This paper describes a method for definition question answering based on the use of surface text patterns. The method is specially suited to answer questions about person’s positions and acronym’s descriptions. It considers two main steps. First, it applies a sequence-mining algorithm to discover a set of definition-related text patterns from the Web. Then, using these patterns, it extracts a collection of concept-description pairs from a target document database, and applies the sequence-mining algorithm to determine the most adequate answer to a given question. Experimental results on the Spanish CLEF 2005 data set indicate that this method can be a practical solution for answering this kind of definition questions, reaching a precision as high as 84%.

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© 2006 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Denicia-Carral, C., Montes-y-Gómez, M., Villaseñor-Pineda, L., Hernández, R.G. (2006). A Text Mining Approach for Definition Question Answering. In: Salakoski, T., Ginter, F., Pyysalo, S., Pahikkala, T. (eds) Advances in Natural Language Processing. FinTAL 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 4139. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11816508_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11816508_10

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-37334-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-37336-0

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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