Answer extraction and ranking strategies for definitional question answering using linguistic features and definition terminology

We propose answer extraction and ranking strategies for definitional question answering using linguistic features and definition terminology. A passage expansion technique based on simple anaphora resolution is introduced to retrieve more informative sentences, and a phrase extraction method based on syntactic information of the sentences is proposed to generate a more concise answer. In order to rank the phrases, we use several evidences including external definitions and definition terminology. Although external definitions are useful, it is obvious that they cannot cover all the possible targets. The definition terminology score which reflects how the phrase is definition-like is devised to assist the incomplete external definitions. Experimental results show that the proposed answer extraction and ranking method are effective and also show that our proposed system is comparable to state-of-the-art systems.