Open-Domain Web-Based List Question Answering with LX-ListQuestion

ABSTRACT

Research in the field of Question Answering (QA) has experienced many advances. However, the development of QA systems continues to be a challenging task. We present a QA Web Application, LX-ListQuestion that focuses on answering list questions where the answers are extracted and composed from several documents retrieved from the Web. The system exploits the redundancy of information available in the Web, combined with word occurrence patterns to improve QA accuracy. Answers are presented in the form of a Word Cloud that uses font size to depict relevance. This paper addresses the main problems that must be dealt with when answering list questions and describes the architecture of the system. We also present an experimental evaluation using a set of questions from QA competition.

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Index Terms

• Human-centered computing

  • Collaborative and social computing

    • Collaborative and social computing systems and tools

• Information systems

  • World Wide Web

• Software and its engineering