Two Discourse Tree - Based Approaches to Indexing Answers

Abstract

We explore anatomy of answers with respect to which text fragments from an answer are worth matching with a question and which should not be matched. We apply the Rhetorical Structure Theory to build a discourse tree of an answer and select elementary discourse units that are suitable for indexing. Manual rules for selection of these discourse units as well as automated classification based on web search engine mining are evaluated concerning improving search accuracy. We form two sets of question-answer pairs for FAQ and community QA search domains and use them for evaluation of the proposed indexing methodology, which delivers up to 16 percent improvement in search recall.