Use of dynamic passage selection and Lexico-Semantic Patterns for Japanese Natural Language Question Answering

Abstract

This paper describes a practical Japanese natural language Question Answering system adopting effective selection of dynamic passages, Lexico-Semantic Patterns (LSP), and Predictive Answer Indexing. By analyzing the previous TREC QA data, we defined a dynamic passage unit and developed a passage selection method suitable for Question Answering. Using LSP, we identify the answer type of a question and detect answer candidates without any deep linguistic analyses of the texts. To guarantee a short response time, Predictive Answer Indexing is combined into our overall system architecture. As a result of the three engineering techniques, our system showed excellent performance when evaluated by mean reciprocal rank (MRR) in NTCIR-3 QAC-1.