FADA: find all distinct answers

Abstract

The wealth of information available on the web makes it an attractive resource for seeking quick answers. While web-based question answering becomes an emerging topic in recent years, the problem of efficiently locating a complete set of distinct answers on the Web is far from being solved. We introduce our system, FADA, which relies on question event analysis, web page clustering, and natural language parsing, to find reliable distinct answers with high recall. The method has been found to be effective in strengthening state-of-the-art Web question answering techniques by emphasizing on answer completeness and uniqueness.