Methods for Using Textual Entailment in Open-Domain Question Answering

Sanda M. Harabagiu, Andrew Hickl

Abstract: Work on the semantics of questions has argued that the relation between a question and its answer(s) can be cast in terms of logical entailment. In this paper, we demonstrate how computational systems designed to recognize textual entailment can be used to enhance the accuracy of current open-domain automatic question answering (Q/A) systems. In our experiments, we show that when textual entailment information is used to either filter or rank answers returned by a Q/A system, accuracy can be increased by as much as 20% overall.