Document retrieval in the context of question answering

Abstract

Current question answering systems rely on document retrieval as a means of providing documents which are likely to contain an answer to a user's question. A question answering system heavily depends on the effectiveness of a retrieval system: If a retrieval system fails to find any relevant documents for a question, further processing steps to extract an answer will inevitably fail, too. In this paper, we compare the effectiveness of some common retrieval techniques with respect to their usefulness for question answering. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.