Accession Number:

ADA462242

Title:

A Noisy-Channel Approach to Question Answering

Descriptive Note:

Conference paper

Corporate Author:

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA MARINA DEL REY INFORMATION SCIENCES INST

Personal Author(s):

• Echihabi, Abdessamad
• Marcu, Daniel

Report Date:

2003-01-01

Pagination or Media Count:

9.0

Abstract:

We introduce a probabilistic noisy-channel model for question answering and we show how it can be exploited in the context of an end-to-end QA system. Our noisy-channel system outperforms a state-of-the-art rule-based QA system that uses similar resources. We also show that the model we propose is flexible enough to accommodate within one mathematical framework many QA-specific resources and techniques, which range from the exploitation of WordNet, structured, and semi-structured databases to reasoning and paraphrasing.

Descriptors:

• *INFORMATION RETRIEVAL
• *COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS
• DATA BASES
• SYMPOSIA
• PARSERS
• MODELS
• PROBABILITY

Subject Categories:

• Information Science
• Linguistics
• Statistics and Probability

Distribution Statement:

APPROVED FOR PUBLIC RELEASE