摘要
Traditional Chinese text retrieval systems return a ranked list of documentsin response to a user''s request. While a ranked list of documents may be an appropriate response forthe user, frequently it is not. Usually it would be better for the system to provide the answeritself instead of requiring the user to search for the answer in a set of documents. Since Chinesetext retrieval has just been developed lately, and due to various specific characteristics ofChinese language, the approaches to its retrieval are quite different from those studies andresearches proposed to deal with Western language. Thus, an architecture that augments existingsearch engines is developed to support Chinese natural language question answering. In this paper anew approach to building Chinese question-answering system is described, which is thegeneral-purpose, fully-automated Chinese quest ion-answering system available on the web. In theapproach, we attempt to represent Chinese text by its characteristics, and try to convert theChinese text into ERE (E: entity, R: relation) relation data lists, and then to answer the questionthrough ERE relation model. The system performs quite well giving the simplicity of the techniquesbeing utilized. Experimental results show that question-answering accuracy can be greatly improvedby analyzing more and more matching ERE relation data lists. Simple ERE relation data extractiontechniques work well in our system making it efficient to use with many backend retrieval engines.
Traditional Chinese text retrieval systems return a ranked list of documentsin response to a user''s request. While a ranked list of documents may be an appropriate response forthe user, frequently it is not. Usually it would be better for the system to provide the answeritself instead of requiring the user to search for the answer in a set of documents. Since Chinesetext retrieval has just been developed lately, and due to various specific characteristics ofChinese language, the approaches to its retrieval are quite different from those studies andresearches proposed to deal with Western language. Thus, an architecture that augments existingsearch engines is developed to support Chinese natural language question answering. In this paper anew approach to building Chinese question-answering system is described, which is thegeneral-purpose, fully-automated Chinese quest ion-answering system available on the web. In theapproach, we attempt to represent Chinese text by its characteristics, and try to convert theChinese text into ERE (E: entity, R: relation) relation data lists, and then to answer the questionthrough ERE relation model. The system performs quite well giving the simplicity of the techniquesbeing utilized. Experimental results show that question-answering accuracy can be greatly improvedby analyzing more and more matching ERE relation data lists. Simple ERE relation data extractiontechniques work well in our system making it efficient to use with many backend retrieval engines.
