Turkish factoid question answering using answer pattern matching

Ankara : The Department of Computer Engineering and Information Science and the Institute of Engineering and Science of Bilkent University, 2009.Thesis (Master's) -- Bilkent University, 2009.Includes bibliographical references.Efficiently locating information on the Web has become one of the most important challenges in the last decade. The Web Search Engines have been used to locate the documents containing the required information. However, in many situations a user wants a particular piece of information rather than a document set. Question Answering (QA) systems have addressed this problem and they return explicit answers to questions rather than set of documents. Questions addressed by QA systems can be categorized into five categories: factoid, list, definition, complex, and speculative questions. A factoid question has exactly one correct answer, and the answer is mostly a named entity like person, date, or location. In this thesis, we develop a pattern matching approach for a Turkish Factoid QA system. In TREC-10 QA track, most of the question answering systems used sophisticated linguistic tools. However, the best performing system at the track used only an extensive list of surface patterns; therefore, we decided to investigate the potential of answer pattern matching approach for our Turkish Factoid QA system. We try different methods for answer pattern extraction such as stemming and named entity tagging. We also investigate query expansion by using answer patterns. Several experiments have been performed to evaluate the performance of the system. Compared with the results of the other factoid QA systems, our methods have achieved good results. The results of the experiments show that named entity tagging improves the performance of the system.Er, Nagehan PalaM.S

Finding Structured and Unstructured Features to Improve the Search Result of Complex Question

-Recently, search engine got challenge deal with such a natural language questions. Sometimes, these questions are complex questions. A complex question is a question that consists several clauses, several intentions or need long answer. In this work we proposed that finding structured features and unstructured features of questions and using structured data and unstructured data could improve the search result of complex questions. According to those, we will use two approaches, IR approach and structured retrieval, QA template. Our framework consists of three parts. Question analysis, Resource Discovery and Analysis The Relevant Answer. In Question Analysis we used a few assumptions, and tried to find structured and unstructured features of the questions. Structured feature refers to Structured data and unstructured feature refers to unstructured data. In the resource discovery we integrated structured data (relational database) and unstructured data (webpage) to take the advantaged of two kinds of data to improve and reach the relevant answer. We will find the best top fragments from context of the webpage In the Relevant Answer part, we made a score matching between the result from structured data and unstructured data, then finally used QA template to reformulate the question. In the experiment result, it shows that using structured feature and unstructured feature and using both structured and unstructured data, using approach IR and QA template could improve the search result of complex questions

Dublin City University at QA@CLEF 2008

We describe our participation in Multilingual Question Answering at CLEF 2008 using German and English as our source and target languages respectively. The system was built using UIMA (Unstructured Information Management Architecture) as underlying framework