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Answering questions with an n-gram based passage retrieval engine

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Abstract

In this paper, we present a Question Answering system based on redundancy and a Passage Retrieval method that is specifically oriented to Question Answering. We suppose that in a large enough document collection the answer to a given question may appear in several different forms. Therefore, it is possible to find one or more sentences that contain the answer and that also include tokens from the original question. The Passage Retrieval engine is almost language-independent since it is based on n-gram structures. Question classification and answer extraction modules are based on shallow patterns.

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Notes

  1. http://www.clef-campaign.org

  2. http://trec.nist.gov

  3. http://www.yahoo.com

  4. The passage retrieval engine JIRS can be obtained at the following URL: http://sourceforge.net/projects/jirs/.

  5. Note that the comma (,) is included in the position count.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the TIN2006-15265-C06-04 research project for partially supporting this work.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. ELiRF Research Group - Departamento de Sistemas Informáticos y Computación, Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, Valencia, Spain

    Davide Buscaldi, Paolo Rosso & Emilio Sanchis

  2. GPLSI Research Group - Departamento de Lenguajes y Sistemas Informáticos, Universidad de Alicante, Alicante, Spain

    José Manuel Gómez-Soriano

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  1. Davide Buscaldi
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  2. Paolo Rosso
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  3. José Manuel Gómez-Soriano
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  4. Emilio Sanchis
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Correspondence to Davide Buscaldi.

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Buscaldi, D., Rosso, P., Gómez-Soriano, J.M. et al. Answering questions with an n-gram based passage retrieval engine. J Intell Inf Syst 34, 113–134 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10844-009-0082-y

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