Japanese question-answering system for contextual questions using simple connection method, decreased adding with multiple answers, and selection by ratio

Abstract

We participated in NTCIR QAC-1, QAC-2, and QAC-3, which were evaluation workshops for answering questions held by the National Institute of Informatics of Japan and studied question-answering systems for contextual questions. Contextual questions are defined as a series of questions with contexts. For example, the first question is "What is the capital of Japan?" and the one succeeding is related to the first such as "What was it called in ancient times?". Contextual question-answering can be considered interactive. This paper describes our system for contextual questions, which obtained the second best accuracy in QAC-1 and the best accuracy in both QAC-2 and QAC-3 for contextual question-answering. It is thus a high-performance system. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.