Some Experiments in Question Answering with a Disambiguated Document Collection

Abstract

Abstract. This paper describes our approach to the Question Answering -Word Sense Disambiguation task. This task consists in carrying out Question Answering over a disambiguated document collection. In our approach, disambiguated documents are used to improve the accuracy of the retrieval phase. In order to do this, we added a WordNet-expanded index to the document collection. The expanded index contains synonyms, hypernyms and holonyms of the words already in the documents. Question words are searched for in both the expanded WordNet index and the default index. The obtained results show that the system that exploited disambiguation obtained better precision than the non-WSD one.

Indexing with WordNet Synonyms May Improve Retrieval Results

“…The Robust-WSD task introduced in CLEF 2009 represents an interesting attempt to foster further investigation in this field. In 2008, we participated in the QA-WSD task using an index expansion method based on WordNet hypernyms, synonyms and holonyms, which exploited the disambiguated collection [1]. The results did not show any relevant difference between the use of disambiguation or not, although we observed that passages returned using the disambiguated collection and our method tended to be shorter with respect to the base system.…”