Assessing the Impact of Thesaurus-Based Expansion Techniques in QA-Centric IR

• Type: Article in International Conference Proceedings Book
• Date: 2009

Authors

Luis Morais Sarmento (Author) FEUP; Jorge Teixeira (Author) FEUP; Eugénio Oliveira (Author) FEUP

Conference proceedings International

Title: CLEF

Pages: 325-332

Evaluating Systems for Multilingual and Multimodal Information Access, 9th Workshop of the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum, CLEF 2008, Aarhus, Denmark, September 17-19, 2008, Revised Selected Papers

Indexing

ISI Proceedings

ISI Web of Knowledge - 1 Citation

Scopus - 1 Citation

Scientific classification

FOS: Natural sciences > Computer and information sciences

CORDIS: Physical sciences > Computer science

Other information

Authenticus ID: P-003-Q31

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-04447-2_37

Abstract (EN): We study the impact of using thesaurus-based query expansion methods at the Information Retrieval (IR) stage of a Questiou Answering (QA) system. We focus on expanding queries for questions regarding actions and events, where, verbs have a central role. Two different thesaurus are used: the OpenOffice thesaurus and an automatically generated verb thesaurus. The performance of thesaurus-based methods is compared against what is obtained by (i) executing no expansion and (ii) applying a simple query generalization method. Results show Oat thesaurus-based approaches help improving recall at retrieval, while keeping satisfactory precision. However, we confirm that positive impact for the final QA performance is mostly achieved due to increase in recall, which can also be obtained by using simpler methods. Nevertheless, because of its better relative precision thesaurus-based expansion is effective in selectively reducing the number of irrelevant text passages retrieved, thus reducing computational load in the answer extraction stage.

Language: English

Type (Professor's evaluation): Scientific

No. of pages: 8