A Hybrid Question Answering Schema Using Encapsulated Semantics in Lexical Resources

Abstract

Question Answering systems, as an extreme of the Information Retrieval field, could save lots of time and effort in satisfying a specific information need. In this regard, there are still many challenges to be resolved by current state-of-the-art systems as they cope with free texts. We propose a new hybrid question answering schema capable of answering questions with respect to different semantically related syntactically mismatched situations either in a structured or unstructured semantic format. We have exploited FrameNet and WordNet lexical resources and implemented the prototype system in a TREC-friendly fashion to obtain results comparable with outstanding participant systems in TREC 2004.