Abstract

We describe BBN’s Question Answering work at TREC 2002. We focus on two issues: answer selection and confidence estimation. We found that some simple constraints on the candidate answers can improve a pure IR-based technique for answer selection. We also found that a few simple features derived from the question-answer pairs can be used for effective confidence estimation. Our results also confirmed earlier findings that the World-Wide Web is a very useful resource for answering TREC-style factoid questions.

Date

2003

Authors

Jinxi Xu, Ana Licuanan, Jonathan May, Scott Miller, Ralph M Weischedel

Conference

New directions in question answering

Pages

134-137