A semantic approach for question analysis

Abstract

The first step that a question answering system must perform is to transform an input question into an intermediate representation. All published works so far use rule-based approaches to realize this transformation in question answering systems. Nevertheless, in existing rule-based approaches, manually creating the rules is error-prone and expensive in time and effort. In this paper, we focus on introducing a rule-based approach that offers an intuitive way to create compact rules for extracting intermediate representation of input questions. Experimental results are promising where our system achieves reasonable performance and demonstrate that it is straightforward to adapt to new domains and languages. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.