Revamping question answering with a semantic approach over world knowledge

Classic textual question answering (QA) approaches that rely on statistical keyword relevance scoring without exploiting semantic content are useful to a certain extent, but are limited to questions answered by a small text excerpt. With the maturation of Wikipedia and with upcoming projects like DBpedia, we feel that nowadays QA can adopt a deeper, semantic approach to the task, where answers can be inferred using knowledge bases to overcome the limitations of textual QA approaches. In GikiCLEF, a QA-flavoured evaluation task, the best performing systems followed a semantic approach. In this paper, we present our motivations for preferring semantic approaches to QA over textual approaches, with Wikipedia serving as a raw knowledge source

GikiP at GeoCLEF 2008: Joining GIR and QA forces for querying Wikipedia

This paper reports on the GikiP pilot that took place in 2008 in GeoCLEF. This pilot task requires a combination of methods from geographical information retrieval and question answering to answer queries to the Wikipedia. We start by the task description, providing details on topic choice and evaluation measures. Then we offer a brief motivation from several perspectives, and we present results in detail. A comparison of participants’ approaches is then presented, and the paper concludes with improvements for the next edition

Partial evaluation for efficient access to inheritance lexicons

Multiple default inheritance formalisms for lexicons have attracted much interest in recent years. I propose a new efficient method to access such lexicons. After showing two basic strategies for lookup in inheritance lexicons, a compromise is developed which combines to a large degree (from a practical point of view) the advantages of both strategies and avoids their disadvantages. The method is a kind of (off-line) partial evaluation that makes a subset of inherited information explicit before using the lexicon. I identify the parts of a lexicon which should be evaluated, and show how partial evaluation works for inheritance lexicons. Finally, the theoretical results are confirmed by a complete implementation. Speedups by a factor of 10–100 are reached

IBL An Inheritance-Based Lexicon Formalism

This paper describes a lexicon formalism (IBL for inheritance-based lex-icon) that uses multiple default inheritance to state generalizations and exceptions in a natural and e cient way. The formalism is inspired by the lexicon formalism in ELU (Environnement Linguistique d'Uni ca-tion). However, IBL contains important extensions and modi cations: 1. use of typed feature structures for intensive static error-checking and e cient implementation on the computer � 2. ner distinction between defeasible and non-defeasible information � 3. means for de ning an in-terface to applications which use a lexicon � 4. special form of a letter tree to decrease the size of lexicons � 5. more readable syntax. The paper de nes the syntax and semantics of IBL lexicons, provides exam-ples of lexicon fragments, discusses the extensions with respect to ELU, compares IBL with other approaches that use inheritance, and gives a