Paraphrase-Driven Learning for Open Question Answering

Anthony Fader, Luke S. Zettlemoyer, Oren Etzioni

Abstract: We study question answering as a machine learning problem, and induce a function that maps open-domain questions to queries over a database of web extractions. Given a large, community-authored, question-paraphrase corpus, we demonstrate that it is possible to learn a semantic lexicon and linear ranking function without manually annotating questions. Our approach automatically generalizes a seed lexicon and includes a scalable, parallelized perceptron parameter estimation scheme. Experiments show that our approach more than quadruples the recall of the seed lexicon, with only an 8% loss in precision.