Building a Foundation System for Producing Short Answers to Factual Questions

In this paper we describe question answering research being pursued as a joint project between Columbia University and the University of Colorado at Boulder as part of ARDA's AQUAINT program. As a foundation for targeting complex questions involving opinions, events, and paragraph-length answers, we recently built two systems for answering short factual questions. We submitted results from the two systems to TREC's Q&A track, and the bulk of this paper describes the methods used in building each system and the results obtained. We conclude by discussing current work aiming at combining modules from the two systems in a unified, more accurate system and adding capabilities for producing complex answers in addition to short ones

Soft pattern matching models for definitional question answering

10.1145/1229179.1229182ACM Transactions on Information Systems252ATIS