DefScriber: a hybrid system for definitional QA

Abstract

Much of the effort in Question Answering (QA) has gone into building short answer QA systems, which answer questions for which the correct answer is a single word or short phrase. However, there are many questions which are better answered with a longer description or explanation. Definitional QA is a developing research area [1] concerned with a subclass of these questions, namely questions of the form “What is X?” DefScriber is a fully implemented system that generates multi-sentence definitions to answer such questions from Internet documents, using an innovative combination of goal-driven and data-driven techniques.