Definition Questions

We describe an in-depth study of using a dictionary (WordNet) and web search engines (Altavista, MSN, and Google) to boost the performance of an automated question answering system, Webclopedia, in …...

Definition questions represent a largely unex- plored area of question answering—they are different from factoid questions in that the goal is to return as many relevant “nuggets” of information about …...

We present a practically unsupervised learning method to produce single-snippet answers to definition questions in ques- tion answering systems that supplement Web search engines. The method exploits on-line encyclopedias and …...