Descriptive question answering in encyclopedia

Abstract

Recently there is a need for a QA system to answer not only factoid questions but also descriptive questions. Descriptive questions are questions which need answers that contain definitional information about the search term or describe some special events. We have proposed a new descriptive QA model and presented the result of a system which we have built to answer descriptive questions. We defined 10 Descriptive Answer Type(DAT)s as answer types for descriptive questions. We discussed how our proposed model was applied to the descriptive question with some experiments. © 2005 Association for Computational Linguistics.