Improving complex interactive question answering with Wikipedia anchor text

Abstract

When the objective of an information retrieval task is to return a nugget rather than a document, query terms that exist in a document will often not be used in the most relevant information nugget in the document. In this paper, a new method of query expansion is proposed based on the Wikipedia link structure surrounding the most relevant articles selected automatically. Evaluated with the Nuggeteer automatic scoring software, an increase in the F-scores is found from the TREC Complex Interactive Question Answering task when integrating this expansion into an already high-performing baseline system. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.