2003 Presentations (Communicative Events)

DefScriber: a hybrid system for definitional QA

McKeown, Kathleen; Blair-Goldensohn, Sasha; Schlaikjer, Andrew Hazen

The implementation of DefScriber, a system for question answering (QA) over the internet was discussed. DefScriber generates multi-sentence definitions to answer questions from internet documents, using an innovative combination of goal-driven and data-driven techniques. The goal-driven part of the system uses a set of definitional predicates to identify types of information which should ideally be included in a definition. DefScriber lets users pose questions interactively via its web interface with robust methods that guarantee that a dynamic definition will be generated for any term contained in an internet document.