DefScriber: a hybrid system for definitional QA

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.