Identifying Definitions in Text Collections for Question Answering

Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2004)

Abstract

One particular type of question which was made the focus of its own subtask within the TREC2003 QA track was the definition question (``What is X?'' or ``Who is X?''). One of the main problems with this type of question is how to discriminate in vast text collections between definitional and non-definitional text passages about a particular definiendum (i.e., the term to be defined). A method will be presented that uses definition patterns and terms that co-occurr with the definiendum in on-line sources for both passage selection and definition extraction.