An Approach to Answer Selection in Question-Answering Based on Semantic Relations
Abstract
A usual strategy to select the ?nal answer in factoid Question-Answering (QA) relies on redundancy. A score is given to each candidate answer as a function of its frequency of occurrence, and the ?nal answer is selected from the set of candidates sorted in decreasing order of score. For that purpose, systems often try to group together semantically equivalent answers. However, they hold several other semantic relations, such as inclusion, which are not considered, and candidates are mostly seen independently, as competitors. Our hypothesis is that not just equivalence, but other relations between candidate answers have impact on the performance of a redundancy-based QA system. In this paper, we describe experimental studies to back up this hypothesis. Our ?ndings show that, with relatively simple techniques to recognize relations, systems’ accuracy can be improved for answers of categories NUMBER, DATE and ENTITY.