15^th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence

	July 21-26 2002 Lyon France

ECAI-2002 Conference Paper

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Towards Answer Extraction: An application to Technical Domains

Fabio Rinaldi, James Dowdall, Michael Hess, Diego Molla, Rolf Schwitter

The shortcomings of traditional Information Retrieval are most evident when users require exact information rather than relevant documents. This practical need is pushing the research community towards systems that can exactly pinpoint those parts of documents that contain the information requested. Answer Extraction (AE) systems aim to satisfy this need. This paper presents one such system (ExtrAns) which works by transforming documents and queries into a semantic representation called Minimal Logical Form (MLF) and derives the answers by logical proof from the documents. MLFs use underspecification to overcome the problems associated with a complete semantic representation and offer the possibility of monotonic, non-destructive extension.

Keywords: Natural Language Processing, Answer Extraction, Information Extraction, Information Retrieval

Citation: Fabio Rinaldi, James Dowdall, Michael Hess, Diego Molla, Rolf Schwitter: Towards Answer Extraction: An application to Technical Domains. In F. van Harmelen (ed.): ECAI2002, Proceedings of the 15th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IOS Press, Amsterdam, 2002, pp.460-464.

ECAI-2002 is organised by the European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence (ECCAI) and hosted by the Université Claude Bernard and INSA, Lyon, on behalf of Association Française pour l'Intelligence Artificielle.