Using Wikipedia and Semantic Resources to Find Answer Types and Appropriate Answer Candidate Sets in Question Answering

摘要

This paper proposes a new idea that uses Wikipedia categories as answer types and defines candidate sets inside Wikipedia. The focus of a given question is searched in the hierarchy of Wikipedia main pages. Our searching strategy combines head-noun matching and synonym matching provided in semantic resources. The set of answer candidates is determined by the entry hierarchy in Wikipedia and the hyponymy hierarchy in WordNet. The experimental results show that the approach can find candidate sets in a smaller size but achieve better performance especially for ARTIFACT and ORGANIZATION types, where the performance is better than state-of-the-art Chinese factoid QA systems.