James Dowdall

Exploiting Paraphrases in a Question Answering System

We present a Question Answering system for technical domains which makes an intelligent use of paraphrases to increase the likelihood of finding the answer to the users question. The system implements a simple and efficient logic representation of questions and answers that maps paraphrases to the same underlying semantic representation. Further, paraphrases of technical terminology are dealt with by a separate process that detects surface variants.

ExtrAns: Extracting answers from technical texts

Describes the ExtrAns answer-extraction system which uses logical forms and lexical relations for semantic representation, to delve into and leverage the meaning of sentences, phrases, and words.

Complex Structuring of Term Variants for Question Answering

Question Answering provides a method of locating precise answers to specific questions but in technical domains the amount of Multi-Word Terms complicates this task.This paper outlines the Question Answering task in such a domain and explores two ways of detecting relations between Multi-Word Terms. The first targets specific semantic relations, the second uses a clustering algorithm, but they are both based on the idea of syntactic variation. The paper demonstrates how the combination of these two methodologies provide sophisticated access to technical domains.

Answer Extraction in Technical Domains

In recent years, the information overload caused by the new media has made the shortcomings of traditional Information Retrieval increasingly evident. Practical needs of industry, government organizations and individual users alike push the research community towards systems that can exactly pinpoint those parts of documents that contain the information requested, rather than return a set of relevant documents. Answer Extraction (AE) systems aim to satisfy this need. In this article we discuss the problems faced in AE and present one such system.