BioGrapher: Biography Questions as a Restricted Domain Question Answering Task
Oren Tsur, Maarten de Rijke and Khalil Sima'an
Proceedings ACL 2004 Workshop on Question Answering in Restricted Domains 2004.

Abstract

This paper addresses Question Answering (QA) for biographical questions, i.e. questions about biographical facts of persons. The domain of biographical documents differs from other restricted domains (e.g. computer manuals) in that the available collection of biographies is rather limited. Hence, a major challenge in biographical QA is to answer questions about persons whose biographical information is not found in the clean collection. This paper presents a biographical QA system (called BioGrapher) that addresses this problem by machine learning algorithms for biography classification. BioGrapher first attempts answering a question by searching in the collection of biographies (biography.com) using techniques tailored for the restricted nature of the domain. If a biography is not found, BioGrapher attempts finding an answer over the internet. Crucially, after document retrieval, BioGrapher filters the retrieved documents using the biography classifier, and then extracts an answer. We exhibit empirical results showing that biographical classification, prior to answer extraction, improves the results.

PDF - Requires Adobe Acrobat Reader or other PDF viewer.

[Edit]