Resource Analysis for Question Answering

Lucian Vlad Lita, Warren A. Hunt, Eric Nyberg

Abstract: This paper attempts to analyze and bound the utility of various structured and unstructured resources in Question Answering, independent of a specific system or component. We quantify the degree to which gazetteers, web resources, encyclopedia, web documents and web-based query expansion can help Question Answering in general and specific question types in particular. Depending on which resources are used, the QA task may shift from complex answer-finding mechanisms to simpler data extraction methods followed by answer re-mapping in local documents.