Developing an approach for why-question answering

Abstract

In the current project, we aim at developing an approach for automatically answering why-questions. We created a data collection for research, development and evaluation of a method for automatically answering why-questions (why-QA) The resulting collection comprises 395 why-questions. For each question, the source document and one or two user-formulated answers are available in the data set. The resulting data set is of importance for our research and it will contribute to and stimulate other research in the field of why-QA. We developed a question analysis method for why-questions, based on syntactic categorization and answer type determination. The quality of the output of this module is promising for future development of our method for why-QA.